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THE HILLS OF HINGHAM. 

WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON Illnstrated. 

THE FACE OF THE FIELDS. 

THE LAY OF THE LAND. 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
Boston and New York 



THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 



THE 

HILLS OF HINGHAM 



BY 



DALLAS LORE SHARP 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
1916 



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COPYRIGHT, I916, BY DALLAS LORE SHA&F 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published April igib 



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APR 10 1916 


ICI.A428448 


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TO THOSE WHO 
** Enforst to seek some shelter nigh at hand" 

HAVE FOUND THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 




PREFACE 

HIS is not exactly the book I 
thought it was going to be — 
though I can say the same of its au- 
thor for that matter. I had intended 
this book to set forth some features of the Earth 
that make it to be preferred to Heaven as a 
place of present abode, and to note in detail the 
peculiar attractions of Hingham over Boston, 
say, — Boston being quite the best city on the 
Earth to live in. I had the book started under 
the title " And this Our Life " 

. . . exempt from public haunt. 
Finds tongues in trees," 

— when, suddenly, war broke out, the gates of 
Hell swung wide open into Belgium, and Heaven 
began to seem the better place. Meanwhile, a 
series of lesser local troubles had been brewing — 
drouth, caterpillars, rheumatism, increased com- 
mutation rates, more college themes, — more 
than I could carry back and forth to Hingham, 

— so that as the writing went on Boston began 



viii PREFACE 

to seem, not a better place than Hingham, but 
a nearer place, somehow, and more thoroughly 
sprayed. 

And all this time the book on Life that I 
thought I was writing was growing chapter by 
chapter into a defense of that book — a defense 
of Life — my life here by my fireside with my 
boys and Her, and the garden and woodlot and 
hens and bees, and days off and evenings at 
home and books to read, yes, and books to write 
— all of which 1 had taken for granted at twenty, 
and believed in with a beautiful faith at thirty, 
when I moved out here into what was then an 
uninfected forest. 

That was the time to have written the book 
that I had intended this one to be — while the 
adventure in contentment was still an adven- 
ture, while the lure of the land was of fourteen 
acres yet unexplored, while back to the soil 
meant exactly what the seed catalogues picture 
it, and my summer in a garden had not yet 
passed into its frosty fall. Instead, I have done 
what no writer ought to do, what none ever did 
before, unless Jacob wrote, — taken a fourteen- 
year-old enthusiasm for my theme, to find the 



PREFACE ix 

enthusiasm grown, as Rachel must have grown 
by the time Jacob got her, into a philosophy, 
and like all philosophies, in need of defense. 

What men live by is an interesting specula- 
tive question, but what men live on, and where 
they can live, — with children to bring up, and 
their own souls to save, — is an intensely prac- 
tical question which I have been working at these 
fourteen years here in the Hills of Hingham. 



CONTENTS 

I. THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 1 

IL THE OPEN FIRE 26 

III. THE ICE CROP 36 

IV. SEED CATALOGUES 46 

V. THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 59 

VL SPRING PLOUGHING ...... 84 

VII. MERE BEANS 93 

VIII. A PILGRIM FROM DUBUQUE . . . .109 

IX. THE HONEY FLOW 121 

X. A PAIR OF PIGS 130 

XL LEAFING 141 

XII. THE LITTLE FOXES 150 

XIII. OUR CALENDAR 172 

XIV. THE FIELDS OF FODDER 18 1 

XV. GOING BACK TO TOWN 197 

XVI. THE CHRISTMAS TREE 216 




THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 




«<As Surrey hills to mountains grew 
In White of Selborne's loving view " 

EALLY there are no hills in Hing- 
ham, to speak of, except Bradley 
Hill and Peartree Hill and Turkey 
Hill, and Otis and Planter's and 
Prospect Hills, Hingham being more noted for 
its harbor and plains. Everybody has heard of 
Hingham smelts. Mullein Hill is in Hingham, 
too, but Mullein Hill is only a wrinkle on the 
face of Liberty Plain, which accounts partly for 
our having it. Almost anybody can have a hill 
in Hingham who is content without elevation, 
a surveyor's term as applied to hills, and a purely 
accidental property which is not at all essential 



12 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

to real hillness, or the sense of height. We have 
a stump on Mullein Hill for height. A hill in 
Hingham is not only possible, but even practi- 
cal as compared with a Forest in Arden, Arden 
being altogether too far from town; besides 

ft ... there's no clock in the forest" 

and we have the 8.35 train to catch of a winter 
morning ! 

"A sheep-cote fenced about with olive trees'* 

sounds more pastoral than apple trees around a 
house on a hill in Hingham, and it would be 
more ideal, too, if New England weather were 
not so much better adapted to apples, and if one 
did not prefer apples, and if one could raise a 
family in a sheep-cote. 

We started in the sheep-cote, back yonder 
when all the world was twenty or thereabouts, 
and when every wild-cherry-bush was an olive 
tree. But one day the tent caterpillar like a wolf 
swept down on our fold of cherry-bushes and we 
fled Arden, never to get back. We lived for a time 
in town and bought olives in bottles, stuffed ones 
sometimes, then we got a hill in Hingham, just 
this side of Arden, still buying our olives, but 



THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 3 

not our apples now, nor our peaches, nor our musk 
melons, nor our wood for the open fire. We buy 
commutation tickets, and pay dearly for the trips 
back and forth. But we could n't make a living 
in Arden. Our hill in Hingham is a compromise. 
Only folk of twenty and close to twenty live 
in Arden. We are forty now and no longer poets. 
When we are really old and our grasshoppers 
become a burden, we may go back to town where 
the insects are an entirely different species ; but for 
this exceedingly busy present, between our fading 
dawn of visions and our coming dusk of dreams, 
a hill in Hingham, though a compromise, is an 
almost strategic position, Hingham being more 
or less of an escape from Boston, and the hill, 
though not in the Forest of Arden, something of 
an escape from Hingham, a quaint old village 
of elm-cooled streets and gentle neighbors. Not 
that we hate Boston, nor that we pass by on the 
other side in Hingham. We gladly pick our 
neighbors up and set them in our motor car and 
bring them to the foot of the hill. We people of 
the hills do not hate either crowds or neighbors. 
We are neighbors ourselves and parts of the city 
crowds too; and we love to bind up wounds and 



4 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

bring folk to their inns. But we cannot take them 
farther, for there are no inns out here. We leave 
them in Hingham and journey on alone into a 
region where neither thief nor anyone infests the 
roadsides; where there are no roads in fact, but 
only driftways and footpaths through the sparsely 
settled hills. 

We leave the crowd on the streets, we leave 
the kind neighbor at his front gate, and travel on, 
not very far, but on alone into a wide quiet coun- 
try where we shall have a chance, perhaps, of 
meeting with ourselves — the day's great adven- 
ture, and far to find; yet this is what we have 
come out to the hills for. 

Not for apples nor wood fires have we a hill 
in Hingham; not for hens and a bigger house, 
and leisure, and conveniences, and excitements; 
not for ways to earn a living, nor for ways to 
spend it. Stay in town for that. There " you can 
even walk alone without being bored. No long, 
uneventful stretches of bleak, wintry landscape, 
where nothing moves, not even the train of 
thought. No benumbed and self-centered trees 
holding out 'pathetic frozen branches for sym- 
pathy. Impossible to be introspective here. Fall 



THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 5 

into a brown or blue study and you are likely to 
be run over. Thought is brought to the surface 
by mental massage. No time to dwell upon your 
beloved self. So many more interesting things to 
think about. And the changing scenes unfold 
more rapidly than a moving-picture reel." 

This sounds much more interesting than the 
country. And it is more interesting, Broadway 
asking nothing of a country lane for excitement 
And back they go who live on excitement; 
while some of us take this same excitement as 
the best of reasons for double windows and storm 
doors and country life the year through. 

You can think in the city, but it is in spite of 
the city. Gregariousness and individuality do not 
abide together; nor is external excitement the 
cause or the concomitant of thought. In fact this 
" mental massage " of the city is to real thinking 
about what a mustard-plaster is to circulation — a 
counter-irritant. The thinker is one who finds him- 
self (quite impossible on Broadway !) ; and then 
finds himself interesting — more interesting than 
Broadway — another impossibility within the city 
limits. Only in the country can he do that, in a 
wide and negative environment of quiet, room, 



6 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

and isolation — necessary conditions for the en- 
joyment of one's own mind. Thought is a coun- 
try product and comes in to the city for distribu- 
tion, as books are gathered and distributed by 
libraries, but not written in libraries. It is against 
the wide, drab background of the country that 
thought most naturally reacts, thinking being only 
the excitement of a man discovering himself, as 
he is compelled to do, where bending horizon 
and arching sky shift as he shifts in all creation's 
constant endeavor to swing around and center on 
him. Nothing centers on him in the city, where 
he thinks by "mental massage" — through the 
scalp with laying on of hands, as by benediction 
or shampoo. 

But for the busy man, say of forty, are the 
hills of Hingham with their adventure possible *? 
Why, there is nothing ailing the man of forty 
except that he now is neither young nor old, nor 
rich, the chances are; nor a dead failure either, 
but just an average man ; yet he is one of God's 
people, if the Philistines were (He brought them 
from Caphtor) and the Syrians (those He brought 
from Kir). The man of forty has a right to so much 
of the Promised Land as a hill in Hingham. 



THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 7 

But he is afraid to possess it because it is so far 
from work and friends and lighted streets. He is 
afraid of the dark and of going off to sit down 
upon a stump for converse with himself He is 
afraid he won't get his w^ork done. If his work 
were planting beans, he would get none planted 
surely while on the stump ; but so he might be 
saved the ungracious task of giving away his 
surplus beans to bean-ridden friends for the sum- 
mer. A man, I believe, can plant too many beans. 
He might not finish the freshman themes either. 
But when was the last freshman theme ever 
done? Finish them if he can, he has only baked 
the freshmen into sophomores, and so emptied 
the ovens for another batch of dough. He shall 
never put a crust on the last freshman, and not 
much of a crust on the last sophomore either, the 
Almighty refusing to cooperate with him in the 
baking. Let him do the best he can, not the most 
he can, and quit for Hingham and the hills where 
he can go out to a stump and sit down. 

College students also are a part of that world 
which can be too much with us, cabbages, too, if 
we are growing cabbages. We don't do over- 
much, but we are over-busy. We want too much. 



8 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

Buy a little hill in Hingham, and even out here, 
unless you pray and go apart often to your stump, 
your desire will be toward every hill in sight and 
the valleys between. 

According to the deed my hill comprises 
" fourteen acres more or less " of an ancient gla- 
cier, a fourteen-acre heap of unmitigated gravel, 
which now these almost fourteen years I have 
been trying to clear of stones, picking, picking 
for a whole Stone Age, and planning daily to 
buy the nine-acre ridge adjoining me which is 
gravelier than mine. By actual count we dumped 
five hundred cartloads of stones into the founda- 
tion of a porch when making 'over the house 
recently — and still I am out in the garden pick- 
ing, picking, living in the Stone Age still, and 
planning to prolong the stay by nine acres more 
that are worse than these I now have, nine times 
worse for stones ! 

I shall never cease picking stones, I presume, 
but perhaps I can get out a permanent injunction 
against myself, to prevent my buying that neigh- 
boring gravel hill, and so find time to climb my 
own and sit down among the beautiful moth- 
infested oak trees. 



THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 9 

I do sit down, and I thrust my idle hands hard 
into my pockets to keep them from the Devil who 
would have them out at the moths instantly — an 
evil job, killing moths, worse than picking stones! 

Nothing is more difficult to find anywhere 
than time to sit down with yourself, except the 
ability to enjoy the time after finding it, — even 
here on a hill in Hingham, if the hill is in woods. 
There are foes to face in the city and floods to 
stem out here, but let no one try to fight several 
acres of caterpillars. When you see them coming, 
climb your stump and wait on the Lord. He is 
slow ; and the caterpillars are horribly fast. True. 
Yet I say. To your stump and wait — and learn 
how restful a thing it is to sit down by faith. 
For the town sprayer is a vain thing. The roof of 
green is riddled. The rafters overhead reach out 
as naked as in December. Ruin looks through. 
On sweep the devouring hosts in spite of arsenate 
of lead and " wilt " disease and Calasoma beetles. 
Nothing will avail; nothing but a new woodlot 
planted with saplings that the caterpillars do not 
eat. Sit still my soul, and know that when these 
oak trees fall there will come up the fir tree and 
the pine tree and the shagbark, distasteful to the 



lo THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

worms; and they shall be to the Lord for a name, 
for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off. 

This is good forestry, and good philosophy — 
a sure handling of both worms and soul. 

But how hard to follow I I would so like to 
help the Lord. Not to do my own share only; 
but to shoulder the Almighty's too, saying — 

"If it were done when *t is done, then *t were well 
It were done quickly " ; 

and I up and do it. But it does not stay done. 
I had sprayed, creosoted, cut, trimmed, cemented, 
only to see the trees die, until I was forced to rest 
upon the stump, when I saw what I had been 
blind to before: that the pine trees were tipped 
with cones, and that there in the tops were the 
red squirrels shucking and giving the winged 
seeds to the winds to sow; and that even now up 
the wooded slope below me, where the first of 
the old oaks had perished, was climbing a future 
grove of seedling pines. 

The forests of Arden are not infested with 
gypsy moths, nor the woods of Heaven either, I 
suppose; but the trees in the hills of Hingham 
are. And yet they are the trees of the Lord ; the 



THE HILLS OF HINGHAM ii 

moths are his also, and the caring for them. I am 
caring for a few college freshmen and my soul. I 
shall go forth to my work until the evening. The 
Lord can take the night-shift; for it was He who 
instituted the twilight, and it is He who must 
needs be responsible till the morning. 

So here a-top my stump in the beleaguered 
woodlot I sit with idle hands, and no stars fall- 
ing, and the universe turning all alone ! 

To wake up at forty a factory hand ! a floor- 
walker! a banker! a college professor! a man 
about town or any other respectably successful, 
humdrum, square wooden peg-of-a-thing in a 
square tight hole! There is an evil, says the 
Preacher, which I have seen under the sun — the 
man of about forty who has become moderately 
successful and automatic, but who has not, and 
now knows he cannot, set the world on fire. This 
is a vanity and it is an evil disease. 

From running the universe at thirty the man 
of forty finds himself running with it, paced be- 
fore, behind, and beside, by other runners and by 
the very stars in their courses. He has struck the 
universal gait, a strong steady stride that will 
carry him to the finish, but not among the medals. 



II THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

This is an evil thing. Forty is a dangerous age. 
The wild race of twenty, the staggering step of 
eighty, are full of peril, but not so deadly as the 
even, mechanical going of forty; for youth has 
the dash in hand; old age has ceased to worry 
and is walking in; while the man of forty is 
right in the middle of the run, grinding along 
on his second wind with the cheering all ahead 
of him. 

In fact, the man of forty finds himself half- 
way across the street with the baby carriage in 
his hands, and touring cars in front of him, and 
limousines behind him, and the hand-of-the- 
law staying and steadying him on his perilous 
course. 

Life may be no busier at forty than at thirty, 
but it is certainly more expensive. Work may 
not be so hard, but the facts of life are a great 
deal harder, the hardest, barest of them being the 
here-and-now of all things, the dead levelness of 
forty — an irrigated plain that has no hill of vis- 
ion, no valley of dream. But it may have its hill 
in Hingham with a bit of meadow down below. 

Mullein Hill is the least of all hills, even with 
the added stump; but looking down through 



THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 13 

the trees I can see the gray road, and an occa- 
sional touring car, like a dream, go by ; and off on 
the Blue Hills of Milton — higher hills than ours 
in Hingham — hangs a purple mist that from 
our ridge seems the very robe and veil of vision. 

The realities are near enough to me here crawl- 
ing everywhere, indeed ; but close as I am to the 
flat earth I can yet look down at things — at the 
road and the passing cars; and off at things — 
the hills and the distant horizon; and so I can 
escape for a time that level stare into the face of 
things which sees them as things close and real, 
but seldom as ///>, far off and whole. 

Perhaps I have never seen life whole ; I may 
need a throne and not a hill and a stump for that ; 
but here in the wideness of the open skies, in the 
sweet quiet, in the hush that often fills these 
deep woods, I sometimes see life free, not free 
from men and things, but unencumbered, com- 
ing to meet me out of the morning and passing 
on with me toward the sunset until, at times, the 
stepping westward, the uneventful onwardness 
of life has 

"... seemed to be 
A kind of heavenly destiny *' 



14 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

and, even the back-and-forth of it, a divine 
thing. 

This knowledge is too wonderful for me; I 
cannot keep fast hold of it; yet to know occa- 
sionally that you are greater than your rhetoric, or 
your acres of stones, or your woods of worms, 
worms that may destroy your trees though you 
spray, is to steady and establish your soul, and 
vastly to comfort it ! 

To be greater than your possessions, than your 
accomplishments, than your desires — greater 
than you know, than anybody at home knows or 
will admit! So great that you can leave your 
plough in the furrow, that you can leave the 
committees to meet, and the trees to fall, and the 
sun to hurry on, while you take your seat upon 
a stump, assured from many a dismaying obser- 
vation that the trees will fall anyhow, that the 
sun will hasten on its course, and that the com- 
mittees, even the committees, will meet and do 
business whether you attend or not ! 

This is bed-rock fact, the broad and solid bot- 
tom for a cheerful philosophy. To know that they 
can get on without you (more knowledge than 
many ever attain !) is the beginning of wisdom ; 



THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 15 

and to learn that you can get on without them — 
at the close of the day, and out here on your hill 
in Hingham — this is the end of understanding. 

If I am no more than the shoes I stitch, or the 
lessons I peg, and the college can so calmly move 
on without me, how small I am ! Let me hope 
that I am useful there, and useful as a citizen-at- 
large ; but I know that I am chiefly and utterly 
dispensable at large, everywhere at large, even 
in Hingham. But not here on my hilltop. Here 
I am indispensable. In the short shift from my 
classroom, from chair to hill, from doing to being, 
I pass from a means into an end, from a part in the 
scheme of things to the scheme of things itself 

Here stands my hill on the highway from 
dawn to dusk, and just where the bending walls 
of the sky center and encircle it. This is not 
only a large place, with room and verge enough ; 
it is also a chief place, where start the north and 
south and east and west, and the gray crooked 
road over which I travel daily. 

I can trace the run of the road from my stump 
on the hill, off to where it bends on the edge of 
night for its returning and rest here. 

«* Let me live in a house by the side of the road,'* 



i6 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

sings the poet ; but as for me, after traveling all 
day let me come back to a house at the end of 
the road — for in returning and rest shall a man 
be saved, in quietness and confidence shall he 
find strength. Nowhere shall he find that quietness 
and confidence in larger measure than here in the 
hills. And where shall he return to more rest *? 

There are men whose souls are like these hills, 
simple, strong, quiet men who can heal and re- 
store; and there are books that help like the hills, 
simple elemental, large books ; music, and sleep, 
and prayer, and play are healing too ; but none of 
these cure and fill one with a quietness and con- 
fidence as deep as that from the hills, even from 
the littlelhills and the small fields and the vast skies 
of Hingham; a confidence and joy in the earth, per- 
haps, rather than in heaven, and yet in heaven too. 

If it is not also a steadied thinking and a 
cleared seeing, it is at least a mental and moral 
convalescence that one gets — out of the land- 
scape, out of its largeness, sweetness and reality. 
I am quickly conscious on the hills of space all 
about me — room for myself, room for the things 
that crowd and clutter me; and as these arrange 
and set themselves in order, I am aware of space 



THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 17 

within me, of freedom and wideness there, of 
things in order, of doors unlocked and windows 
opened, through which I look out upon a new 
young world, new like the morning, young like 
the seedling pines on the slope — young and 
new like my soul ! 

Now I can go back to my classroom. Now I 
can read themes once more. Now I can gaze into 
the round, moon-eyed face of youth and have faith 
— as if my chair were a stump, my classroom a 
wooded hillside covered with young pines, seed- 
lings of the Lord, and full of sap, and proof 
against the worm. 

Yet these are the same youth who yesterday 
wrote the " Autobiography of a Fountain Pen " 
and " The Exhilarations of the Straw-Ride " and 
the essays on "The Beauties of Nature." It is I who 
am not the same. I have been changed, renewed, 
having seen from my stump the face of eternal 
youth in the freshmen pines marching up the hill- 
side, in the young brook playing and pursuing 
through the meadow, in the young winds over 
the trees, the young stars in the skies, the young 
moon riding along the horizon 

** With the auld moon in her arm'* — 



i8 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

youth immortal, and so, unburdened by its 
withered load of age. 

I come down from the hill with a soul resur- 
gent, — strong like the heave that overreaches the 
sag of the sea, — and bold in my faith — to a lot 
of college students as the hope of the world ! 

From the stump in the woodlot I see not only 
the face of things but the course of things, that 
they are moving past me, over me, and round and 
round me their fixed center — for the horizon to 
bend about, for the sky to arch over, for the high- 
ways to start from, for every influence and inter- 
est between Hingham and Heaven to focus on. 

" All things journey sun and moon 
Morning noon and afternoon. 
Night and all her stars, ' * — 

and they all journey about me on my stump in 
the hilltop. 

We love human nature; we love to get back 
to it in New York and Boston, — for a day, for 
six months in the winter even, — but we need to 
get back to the hills at night. We are a conven- 
tional, gregarious, herding folk. Let an Amer- 
ican get rich and he builds a grand house in the 
city. Let an Englishman get rich and he moves 



THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 19 

straight into the country — out to such a spot as 
Bradley Hill in Hingham. 

There are many of the city's glories and con- 
veniences lacking here on Mullein Hill, but 
Mullein Hill has some of the necessities that are 
lacking in the city — wide distances and silent 
places, and woods and stumps where you can sit 
down and feel that you are greater than anything 
in sight. In the city the buildings are too vast; the 
people are too many. You might feel greater than 
any two or three persons there, perhaps, but not 
greater than nearly a million. 
. No matter how centered and serene I start from 
Hingham, a little way into Boston and I am lost. 
First I begin to hurry (a thing unnecessary in 
Hingham) for everybody else is hurrying; then 
I must get somewhere ; everybody else is getting 
somewhere, gettmg everywhere. For see them in 
front of me and behind me, getting there ahead 
of me and coming after me to leave no room for 
me when I shall arrive ! But when shall I and 
where shall I arrived And what shall I arrive 
for*? And who am I that I would arrive'? I look 
around for the encircling horizon, and up for the 
overarching sky, and in for the guiding purpose; 



20 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

but instead of a purpose I am hustled forward by 
a crowd, and at the bottom of a street far down 
beneath such overhanging walls as leave me but 
a slit of smoky sky. I am in the hands of a 
force mightier than I, in the hands of the police 
force at the street corners, and am carried across to 
the opposite curb through a breaker that rolls in 
front of me again at the next crossing. So I move 
on, by external compulsion, knowing, as I move, 
by a kind of mental contagion, feeling by a sort 
of proxy, and putting my trust everywhere in 
advertising and the police. 

Thus I come, it may be, into the Public Li- 
brary, " where is all the recorded wit of the world, 
but none of the recording," — where Shakespeare 
and Old Sleuth and Pansy look all alike and 
as readable as the card catalogues, or the boy 
attendants, or the signs of the Zodiac in the ves- 
tibule floor. 

Who can read all these books'? Who wishes 
to read any of these books ? They are too many — 
more books in here than men on the street out- 
side I And how dead they are in here, wedged 
side by side in this vast sepulcher of human 
thought ! 



THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 21 

I move among them dully, the stir of the streets 
coming to me as the soughing of wind on the 
desert or the wash of waves on a distant shore. 
Here I find a book of my own among the dead. 
I read its inscription curiously. I must have 
written it — when I was alive seons ago, and far 
from here. But why did I *? For see the unread, 
the shelved, the numbered, the buried books ! 

Let me out to the street ! Dust we are, not 
books, and unto dust, good fertile soil, not paper 
and ink, we shall return. No more writing for me 
— but breathing and eating and jostling with the 
good earthy people outside, laughing and loving 
and dying with them ! 

The sweet wind in Copley Square ! The sweet 
smell of gasoline ! The sweet scream of electric 
horns ! 

And how sweet — how fat and alive and 
friendly the old colored hack driver, standing 
there by the stone post ! He has a number on his 
cap; he is catalogued somewhere, but not in the 
library. Thank heaven he is no book, but just a 
good black human being. I rush up and shake 
hands with him. He nearly falls into his cab 
with astonishment; but I must get hold of life 



22 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

again, and he looks so real and removed from 
letters ! 

" Uncle ! " I whisper, close in his ear, " have 
ye got it ? Quick — 

«< < Cross me twice wid de raabbit foot — 
Dar 's steppin* at de doo* ! 
Cross me twice wid de raabbit foot— • 
Dar 's creakin' on de floo* ! ' '* 

He makes the passes, and I turn down Boylston 
Street, a living thing once more with face toward 
— the hills of Hingham. 

It is five o'clock, and a winter evening, and 
all the street pours forth to meet me — some 
of them coming with me bound for Hingham, 
surely, as all of them are bound for a hill some- 
where and a home. 

I love the city at this winter hour. This home- 
hurrying crowd — its excitement of escape! its 
eagerness and expectancy ! its camaraderie ! The 
arc-lights overhead glow and splutter with the joy 
they see on the faces beneath them. 

It is nearly half-past five as I turn into Winter 
Street. Now the very stores are closing. Work 
has ceased. Drays and automobiles are gone. 
The two-wheeled fruit man is going from his 



THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 23 

stand at the Subway entrance. The street is filled 
from wall to wall with men and women, young 
women and young men, fresher, more eager, more 
excited, more joyous even than the lesser crowd 
of shoppers down Boylston Street. They don't 
notice me particularly. No one notices any one 
particularly, for the lights overhead see us all, 
and we all understand as we cross and dodge and 
lockstep and bump and jostle through this deep 
narrow place of closing doors toward home. Then 
the last rush at the station, that nightly baptism 
into human brotherhood as we plunge into the 
crowd and are carried through the gates and into 
our train — which is speeding far out through the 
dark before I begin to come to myself — find my- 
self leaving the others, separating, individualizing, 
taking on definite shape and my own being. The 
train is grinding in at my station, and I drop out 
along the track in the dark alone. 

I gather my bundles and hug them to me, 
feeling not the bread and bananas, but only the 
sense of possession, as I step off down the track. 
Here is my automobile. Two miles of back- 
country road lie before me. I drive slowly, the 
stars overhead, but not far away, and very close 



24 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

about me the deep darkness of the woods — and 
silence and space and shapes invisible, and voices 
inaudible as yet to my city-dinned ears and star- 
ing eyes. But sight returns, and hearing, till soon 
my very fingers, feeling far into the dark, begin 
to see and hear. 

And now I near the hill: these are my woods; 
this is my gravel bank; that my meadow, my 
wall, my postbox, and up yonder among the 
trees shines my light. They are expecting me, 
She, and the boys, and the dog, and the blazing 
fire, the very trees up there, and the watching 
stars. 

How the car takes the hill — as if up were 
down, and wheels were wings, and just as if the 
boys and the dog and the dinner and the fire 
were all waiting for it I As they are, of course, 
it and me. I open up the throttle, I jam the 
shrieking whistle, and rip around the bend in the 
middle of the hill, — puppy yelping down to meet 
me. The noise we make as the lights flash on, as 
the big door rolls back, and we come to our 
nightly standstill inside the boy-filled barn ! They 
drag me from the wheel — puppy yanking at 
my trouser leg; they pounce upon my bundles; 



THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 25 

they hustle me toward the house, where, in the 
lighted doorway more welcome waits me — and 
questions, batteries of them, even puppy joining 
the attack! 

Who would have believed I had seen and 
done all this, — had any such adventurous trip, — 
lived any such significant day, — catching my 
regular 8.35 train as I did ! 

But we get through the dinner and some of 
the talk and then the out-loud reading before the 
fire; then while she is tucking the children in 
bed, I go out to see that all is well about the 
barn. 

How the night has deepened since my return ! 
No wind stirs. The hill-crest blazes with the 
light of the stars. Such an earth and sky ! I lock 
the barn, and crossing the field, climb the ridge 
to the stump. The bare woods are dark with 
shadow and deep with the silence of the night. 
A train rumbles somewhere in the distance, then 
the silence and space reach off through the shad- 
ows, infinitely far off down the hillside ; and the 
stars gather in the tops of the trees. 




II 



THE OPEN FIRE 




,T is a January night. 

** Enclosed 

From Chaos and the inroad of Darkness old," 

we sit with our book before the 
fire. Outside in the night ghostly shapes pass by, 
ghostly faces press against the window, and at the 
corners of the house ghostly voices pause for 
parley, muttering thickly through the swirl and 
smother of the snow. Inside burns the fire, kin- 
dling into glorious pink and white peonies on 
the nearest wall and glowing warm and sweet 



THE OPEN FIRE 27 

on her face as she reads. The children are in 
bed. She is reading aloud to me: 

" ' I wish the good old times would come 
again/ she said, 'when we were not quite so 
rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor, but 
there was a middle state' — so she was pleased 
to ramble on — 'in which, I am sure, we were 
a great deal happier.' " 

Her eyes left the familiar page, wandering far 
away beyond the fire. 

" Is it so hard to bear up under two thousand 
five hundred a year ? " I asked. 

The gleam of the fire, or perhaps a fancy out 
of the far-beyond, lighted her eyes as she an- 
swered, 

" We began on four hundred and fifty a year; 
and we were perfectly — " 

"Yes, but you forget the parsonage; that was 
rent free ! " 

" Four hundred and fifty with rent free — and 
we had everything we could — " 

" You forget again that we had n't even one 
of our four boys." 

Her gaze rested tenderly upon the little chairs 
between her and the fire, just where the boys 



28 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

had left them at the end of their listening an 
hour before. 

" If you had allowed me," she went on, " I 
was going to say how glad we ought to be that 
we are not quite so rich as — " 

" We should like to be ? " I questioned. 

" ' A purchase ' " — she was reading again — 
" ' is but a purchase, now that you have money 
enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a 
triumph. Do you not remember the brown suit, 
which you made to hang upon you, till all your 
friends cried shame upon you, it grew so thread- 
bare — and all because of that folio Beaumont 
and Fletcher which you dragged home late at 
night from Barker's in Covent Garden? Do 
you remember how we eyed it for weeks before 
we could make up our minds to the purchase, 
and had not come to a determination till it was 
near ten o'clock of the Saturday night, when you 
set off from Islington, fearing — ' 

" Is n't this exactly our case ? " she asked, in- 
terrupting herself for no other purpose than to 
prolong the passage she was reading. 

"Truly," I replied, trying hard to hide a note 
of eagerness in my voice, for I had kept my bat- 



THE OPEN FIRE 29 

tery masked these many months, "only Lamb 
wanted an old folio, whereas we need a new car. 
I have driven that old machine for five years and 
it was second-hand to begin with." 

I watched for the effect of the shot, but evi- 
dently I had not got the range, for she was say- 
ing, 

*'Is there a sweeter bit in all of 'Elia' than 
this, do you think? 

"' — And when the old bookseller with some 
grumbling opened his shop, and by the twink- 
ling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted 
out the relic from his dusty treasures — and 
when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice 
as cumbersome — ' " 

She had paused again. To know when to 
pause ! how to make the most of your author ! 
to draw out the linked sweetness of a passage to 
its longest — there reads your loving reader! 

" You see," laying her hand on mine, " old 
books and old friends are best, and I should 
think you had really rather have a nice safe old 
car than any new one. Thieves don't take old 
cars, as you know. And you can't insure them, 
that 's a comfort ! And cars don't skid and col- 



30 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

lide just because they are old^ do they? And you 
never have to scold the children about the paint 
and — and the old thing does go — what do you 
think Lamb would say about old cars % " 

" Lamb be hanged on old cars !" and I sent the 
sparks flying with a fresh stick. 

" Well, then let 's hear the rest of him on ' Old 
China.' " And so she read, while the fire burned, 
and outside swept the winter storm. 

I have a weakness for out-loud reading and 
Lamb, and a peculiar joy in wood fires when the 
nights are dark and snowy. My mind is not, after 
all, much set on automobiles then; there is such 
a difference betw^een a wild January night on 
Mullein Hill and an automobile show — or any 
other show. If St. Bernard of Cluny had been an 
American and not a monk, I think Jerusalem the 
Golden might very likely have been a quiet little 
town like Hingham, all black with a winter night 
and lighted for the Saint with a single open fire. 
Anyhow I cannot imagine the mansions of the 
Celestial City without fireplaces. I don't know 
how the equatorial people do; I have never lived 
on the equator, and I have no desire to — nor in 
any other place where it is too hot for a fireplace, 



THE OPEN FIRE 31 

or where wood is so scarce that one Is obliged to 
substitute a gas-log. I wish I could build an open 
hearth into every lowly home and give every 
man who loves out-loud reading a copy of Lamb 
and sticks enough for a fire. I wish — is it futile 
to wish that besides the fireplace and the sticks 
I might add a great many more winter evenings 
to the round of the year? I would leave the days 
as they are in their beautiful and endless variety, 
but the long, shut-in winter evenings 

"When young and old in circle 
About the firebrands close — '* 

these I would multiply, taking them away from 
June to give to January, could I supply the fire 
and the boys and the books and the reader to go 
with them. 

And I often wonder if more men might not 
supply these things for themselves? There are 
January nights for all, and space enough outside 
of city and suburb for simple firesides ; books 
enough also ; yes, and readers-aloud if they are 
given the chance. But the boys are hard to get. 
They might even come girls. Well, what is the 
difference, anyway ? Suppose mine had been dear 



32 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

things with ribbons in their hair — not these four, 
but four more ? Then all the glowing circle about 
the fireplace had been filled, the chain complete, 
a link of fine gold for every link of steel I Ah I 
the cat hath nine lives, as Phisologus saith; but 
a man hath as many lives as he hath sons, with 
two lives besides for every daughter. So it must 
always seem to me when I remember the precious 
thing that vanished from me before I could even 
lay her in her mother's arms. She would have 
been, I think, a full head taller than the oldest 
boy, and wiser than all four of the boys, being a 
girl. 

The real needs of life are few, and to be had 
by most men, even though they include children 
and an automobile. Second-hand cars are very 
cheap, and the world seems full of orphans — 
how many orphans now ! It is n't a question of 
getting the things; the question is. What are the 
necessary things ? 

First, I say, a fireplace. A man does well to 
build his fireplace first instead of the garage. 
Better than a roof over one's head is a fire at 
one's feet; for what is there deadlier than the chill 
of a fireless house? The fireplace first, unless in- 



THE OPEN FIRE 33 

deed he have the chance, as I had when a boy, 
to get him a pair of tongs. 

The first piece of household furniture I ever 
purchased was a pair of old tongs. I was a lad in 
my teens. " Five — five — five — five — v-v- v-ve 
will you make it ten"?" I heard the auctioneer 
cry as I passed the front gate. He held a pair of 
brass-headed hearth tongs above his head, waving 
them wildly at the unresponsive bidders. 

" Will you make it ten "? " he yelled at me as 
the last comer. 

" Ten," I answered, a need for fire tongs, that 
blistering July day, suddenly overcoming me. 

"And sold for ten cents to the boy in the 
gate," shouted the auctioneer. "Will somebody 
throw in the fireplace to go with them !" 

I took my tongs rather sheepishly, I fear, 
rather helplessly, and got back through the gate, 
for I was on foot and several miles from home. 
I trudged on for home carrying those tongs with 
me all the way,°'not knowing why, not wishing to 
throw them into the briers for they were very old 
and full of story, and I — was very young and full 
of — I cannot tell, remembering what little l?oys 
are made of And now here they lean against the 



34 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

hearth, that very pair. I packed them in the bot- 
tom of my trunk when I started for college; I 
saved them through the years when our open fire 
was a "base-burner," and then a gas-radiator in 
a city flat. Moved, preserved, "married" these 
many years, they stand at last where the boy must 
have dreamed them standing — that hot July day, 
how long, long ago ! 

But why should a boy have dreamed such 
dreams? And what was it in a married old pair 
of brass-headed hearth tongs that a boy in his 
teens should have bought them at auction and 
then have carried them to college with him, rat- 
tling about on the bottom of his trunk? For it 
was not an over-packed trunk. There were the 
tongs on the bottom and a thirty-cent edition of 
" The Natural History of Selborne " on the top — 
that is all. That is all the boy remembers. These 
two things, at least, are all that now remain out 
of the trunkful he started with from home — the 
tongs for sentiment, and for friendship the book. 

"Are you listening?" she asks, looking up to 
see if I have gone to sleep. 

" Yes, I 'm listening." 

"And dreaming?" 



THE OPEN FIRE 3s 

" Yes, dreaming a little, too, — of you, dear, 
and the tongs there, and the boys upstairs, and 
the storm outside, and the fire, and of this sweet 
room, — an old, old dream that I had years and 
years ago, — all come true, and more than true." 

She slipped her hand into mine. 

"Shall I go on?" 

"Yes, go on, please, and I will listen — and, 
if you don't mind, dream a little, too, perhaps." 

There is something in the fire and the rise and 
fall of her voice, something so infinitely sooth- 
ing in its tones, and in Lamb, and in such a night 
as' this — so vast and fearful, but so futile in its 
bitter sweep about the fire — that while one lis- 
tens one must really dream too. 




Ill 



THE ICE CROP 




HE ice-cart with its weighty tongs 
never climbs our Hill, yet the ice- 
chest does not lack its clear blue 
cake of frozen February. We 
gather our own ice as we gather our own hay and 
apples. The small ice-house under the trees has 
just been packed with eighteen tons of " black " 
ice, sawed and split into even blocks, tier on tier, 
the harvest of the curing cold, as loft and cellar 
are still filled with crops made in the summer's 
curing heat. So do the seasons overlap and run 
together ! So do they complement and multiply 



THE ICE CROP 37 

each other ! Like the star-dust of Saturn they belt 
our fourteen-acre planet, not with three rings, nor 
four, but with twelve, a ring for every month, a 
girdle of twelve shining circles running round 
the year — the tinkling ice of February in the 
goblet of October ! — the apples of October red 
and ripe on what might have been April's empty 
platter ! 

He who sows the seasons and gathers the 
months into ice-house and barn lives not from 
sunup to sundown, revolving with the hands of 
the clock, but, heliocentric, makes a daily circuit 
clear around the sun — the smell of mint in the 
hay-mow, a reminder of noontime passed; the 
prospect of winter in the growing garden, a gentle 
warning of night coming on. Twelve times one 
are twelve — by so many times are months and 
meanings and values multiplied for him whose 
fourteen acres bring forth abundantly — provided 
that the barns on the place be kept safely small. 

Big barns are an abomination unto the Lord, 
and without place on a wise man's estate. As birds 
have nests, and foxes dens, so may any man have 
a place to lay his head, with a mansion prepared 
in the sky for his soul. 



38 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

Big barns are as foolish for the ice-man as for 
others. The barns of an ice-man must needs be 
large, yet they are over-large if he can say to his 
soul: " Soul, thou hast much ice laid up for many 
days; eat, drink, and be merry among the cakes " 
— and when the autumn comes he still has a barn 
full of solid cemented cakes that must be sawed 
out ! No soul can be merry long on ice — nor on 
sugar, nor shoes, nor stocks, nor hay, nor any- 
thing of that sort in great quantities. He who 
builds great barns for ice, builds a refrigerator for 
his soul. Ice must never become a man's only 
crop; for then winter means nothing but ice; and 
the year nothing but winter ; for the year 's never 
at the spring for him, but always at February or 
when the ice is making and the mercury is down 
to zero. 

As I have already intimated, a safe kind of 
ice-house is one like mine, that cannot hold more 
than eighteen tons — a year's supply (shrinkage 
and Sunday ice-cream and other extras provided 
for). Such an ice-house is not only an ice-house, 
it is also an act of faith, an avowal of confidence 
in the stability of the frame of things, and in their 
orderly continuance. Another winter will come, 



THE ICE CROP 39 

it proclaims, when the ponds will be pretty sure 
to freeze. If they don't freeze, and never do again 
— well, who has an ice-house big enough in that 
event *? 

My ice-house is one of life's satisfactions ; not 
architecturally, of course, for there has been no 
great development yet in ice-house lines, and this 
one was home-done ; it is a satisfaction morally, 
being one thing I have done that is neither more 
nor less. I have the big-barn weakness — the 
desire for ice — for ice to melt — as if I were no 
wiser than the ice-man! I builded bigger than I 
knew when I put the stone porches about the 
dwelling-house, consulting in my pride the archi- 
tect first instead of the town assessors. I took no 
counsel of pride in building the ice-house, nor 
of fear, nor of my love of ice. I said : " I will 
build me a house to carry a year's supply of ice 
and no more, however the price of ice may rise, 
and even with the risk of facing seven hot and 
iceless years. I have laid up enough things 
among the moths and rust. Ice against the rainy 
day I will provide, but ice for my children and 
my children's children, ice for a possible cosmic 
reversal that might twist the equator over the 



40 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

poles, I will not provide for. Nor will I go into 
the ice business." 

Nor did I ! And I say the building of that 
ice-house has been an immense satisfaction to 
me. I entertain my due share of 

<* Gorgons, and hydras and chimaeras dire*'; 

but a cataclysm of the proportions mentioned 
above would as likely as not bring on another 
Ice Age, or indeed — 

** . . . run back and fetch the Age of Gold.** 

To have an ice-house, and yourself escape cold 
storage — that seems to me the thing. 

I can fill the house in a single day, and so 
trade a day for a year ; or is it not rather that I 
crowd a year into a day ? Such days are possi- 
ble. It is not any day that I can fill the ice-house. 
Ice-day is a chosen, dedicated day, one of the 
year's high festivals, the Day of First Fruits, the 
ice crop being the year's earliest harvest. Hay 
is made when the sun shines, a condition some- 
times slow in coming ; but ice of the right qual- 
ity and thickness, with roads right, and sky right 
for harvesting, requires a conjunction of right 
conditions so difficult as to make a good ice-day 



THE ICE CROP 41 

as rare as a day in June. June ! why, June knows 
no such glorious weather as that attending the 
harvest of the ice. 

This year it fell early in February — rather 
late in the season ; so late, in fact, that, in spite 
of my faith in winter, I began to grow anxious 
— something no one on a hill in Hingham need 
ever do. Since New Year's Day unseasonable 
weather had prevailed: shifty winds, uncertain 
skies, rain and snow and sleet — that soft, spongy 
weather when the ice soaks and grows soggy. By 
the middle of January what little ice there had 
been in the pond was gone, and the ice-house 
was still empty. 

Toward the end of the month, however, the 
skies cleared, the wind settled steadily into the 
north, and a great quiet began to deepen over 
the fields, a quiet that at night grew so tense 
you seemed to hear the close-glittering heavens 
snapping with the light of the stars. Everything 
seemed charged with electric cold; the rich soil 
of the garden struck fire like flint beneath your 
feet; the tall hillside pines, as stiff as masts of 
steel, would suddenly crack in the brittle silence, 
with a sharp report ; and at intervals throughout 



42 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

the taut boreal night you could hear a hollow 
rumbling running down the length of the pond 
— the ice being split with the wide iron wedge 
of the cold. 

Down and down for three days slipped the 
silver column in the thermometer until at eight 
o'clock on the fourth day it stood just above 
zero. Cold ? It was splendid weather ! with four 
inches of ice on the little pond behind the ridge, 
glare ice, black as you looked across it, but like a 
pane of plate glass as you peered into it at the 
stirless bottom below; smooth glare ice untouched 
by the wing of the wind or by even the circling 
runner of the skater-snow. Another day and 
night like this and the solid square-edged blocks 
could come in. 

I looked at the glass late that night and found 
it still falling. I went on out beneath the stars. It 
may have been the tightened telephone wires 
overhead, or the frozen ground beneath me ring- 
ing with the distant tread of the coming north 
wind, yet over these, and with them, I heard the 
singing of a voiceless song, no louder than the 
winging hum of bees, but vaster — the earth and 
air responding to a starry lyre as some ^Eolian 



THE ICE CROP 43 

harper, sweeping through the silvery spaces of the 
night, brushed the strings with her robes of jew- 
eled cold. 

The mercury stood at zero by one o'clock. A 
biting wind had risen and blew all the next day. 
Eight inches of ice by this time. One night more 
and the crop would be ripe. And it was ripe. 

I was] out before the sun, tramping down to 
the pond with pike and saw, the team not likely 
to be along for half an hour yet, the breaking of 
the marvelous day all mine. Like apples of gold 
in baskets of silver were the snow-covered ridges 
in the light of the slow-coming dawn. The wind 
had fallen, but the chill seemed the more intense, 
so silently it took hold. My breath hung about 
me in little gray clouds, covering my face, and 
even my coat, with rime. As the hurt passed 
from my fingers, my eyebrows seemed to become 
detached, my cheeks shrunk, my flesh suddenly 
free of cumbering clothes. But in half a minute 
the rapid red blood would come beating back, 
spreading over me and out from me, with the 
pain, and then the glow, of life, of perfect life 
that seemed itself to feed upon the consuming 
cold. 



44 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

No other living thing was yet abroad, no stir or 
sound except the tinkling of tiny bells all about 
me that were set to swinging as I moved along. 
The crusted snow was strewn with them ; every 
twig was hung, and every pearl-bent grass blade. 
Then off through the woods rang the chime of 
louder bells, sleigh bells; then the shrill squeal 
of iron runners over dry snow ; then the broken 
voices of men; and soon through the winding 
wood road came the horses, their bay coats white, 
as all things were, with the glittering dust of the 
hoar frost. 

It was beautiful work. The mid-afternoon 
found us in the thick of a whirling storm, the 
grip of the cold relaxed, the woods abloom with 
the clinging snow. But the crop was nearly in. 
High and higher rose the cold blue cakes within 
the ice-house doors until they touched the rafter 
plate. 

It was hard work. The horses pulled hard; the 
men swore hard, now and again, and worked 
harder than they swore. They were rough, simple 
men, crude and elemental like their labor. It was 
elemental work — filling a house with ice, three 
hundred-pound cakes of clean, clear ice, cut from 



THE ICE CROP 45 

the pond, skidded into the pungs, and hauled 
through the woods all white, and under a sky all 
gray, with softly-falling snow. They earned their 
penny; and I earned my penny, and I got it, 
though I asked only the wages of going on 
from dawn to dark, down the crystal hours of 
the day. 




IV 
SEED CATALOGUES 




HE new number of the ' Atlantic ' 
came to-day," She said, stopping 
by the table. "It has your essay 
in it." 

" Yes "? " I replied, only half hearing. 
" You have seen it, then ? " 
" No " — still absorbed in my reading. 
" What is it you are so interested in ? " she in- 
quired, laying down the new magazine. 
" A seed catalogue." 

" More seed catalogues ! Why, you read noth- 
ing else last night." 

" But this is a new one," I replied, " and I de- 
clare I never saw turnips that could touch this 



SEED CATALOGUES 47 

improved strain here. I am going to plant a lot 
of them this year." 

" How many seed catalogues have you had this 
spring *? " 

" Only six, so far." 

" And you plant your earliest seeds — " 

" In April, the middle of April, though I may 
be able to get my first peas in by the last of 
March. You see peas " — she was backing away 
— "this new Antarctic Pea — will stand a lot 
of cold ; but beans — do come here, and look at 
these Improved Kentucky Wonder Pole Beans ! " 
holding out the wonderfully lithographed page 
toward her. But she backed still farther away, 
and, putting her hands behind her, looked at me 
instead, and very solemnly. 

I suppose every man comes to know that un- 
accountable expression in his wife's eyes soon or 
late : a sad, baffled expression, detached, remote, 
as of things seen darkly, or descried afar off; an 
expression which leaves you feeling that you are 
afar off, — discernible, but infinitely dwindled. 
Two minds with but a single thought — so you 
start ; but soon she finds, or late, that as the heav- 
ens are high above the earth, so are some of your 



48 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

thoughts above her thoughts. She cannot follow. 
On the brink she stands and sees you, through 
the starry spaces, drift from her ken in your fleet 
of — seed catalogues. 

I have never been able to explain to her the 
seed catalogue. She is as fond of vegetables as I, 
and neither of us cares much for turnips — nor for 
carrots, nor parsnips either, when it comes to that, 
our two hearts at the table beating happily as one. 
Born in the country, she inherited a love of the 
garden, but a feminine garden, the g2ir d^n parvus y 
minor, minimus — so many cut-worms long, so 
many cut-worms wide. I love a garden of size, a 
garden that one cut-worm cannot sweep down 
upon in the night. 

For years I have wanted to be a farmer, but 
there in the furrow ahead of me, like a bird on its 
nest, she has sat with her knitting ; and when I 
speak of loving long rows to hoe, she smiles and 
says, " For the boys to hoe." Her unit of garden 
measure is a meal — so many beet seeds for a 
meal ; so many meals for a row, with never two 
rows of anything, with hardly a full-length row 
of anything, and with all the rows of different 
lengths, as if gardening were a sort of geometry 



SEED CATALOGUES 49 

or a problem in arithmetic, figuring your vege- 
table with the meal for a common divisor — how 
many times it will go into all your rows without 
leaving a remainder ! 

Now I go by the seed catalogue, planting, not 
after the dish, as if my only vision were a garden 
peeled and in the pot, but after the Bush., Peck, 
Qt., Pt., Lb., Oz., Pkg., — so many pounds to 
the acre^ instead of so many seeds to the meal. 

And I have tried to show her that gardening is 
something of a risk, attended by chance, and 
no such exact science as dressmaking; that you 
cannot sow seeds as you can sew buttons ; that 
the seed-man has no machine for putting sure- 
sprout-humps into each of his minute wares as the 
hook-and- eye-man has; that with all wisdom and 
understanding one could do no better than to buy 
(as I am careful to do) out of that catalogue 
whose title reads "Honest Seeds"; and that even 
the Sower in Holy Writ allowed somewhat for 
stony places and other inherent hazards of plant- 
ing time. 

But she follows only afar off, affirming the pri- 
mary meaning of that parable to be plainly set 
forth in the context, while the secondary meaning 



50 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

pointeth out the folly of sowing seed anywhere 
save on good ground — which seemed to be only 
about one quarter of the area in the parable that 
was planted; and that anyhow, seed catalogues, 
especially those in colors, designed as they are 
to catch the simple-minded and unwary, need to 
be looked into by the post-office authorities and 
if possible kept from all city people, and from 
college professors in particular. 

She is entirely right about the college profes- 
sors. Her understanding is based upon years of 
observation and the patient cooking of uncounted 
pots of beans. 

I confess to a weakness for gardening and no 
sense at all of proportion in vegetables. I can no 
more resist a seed catalogue than a toper can his 
cup. There is no game, no form of exercise, to 
compare for a moment in my mind with having a 
row of young growing things in a patch of mellow 
soil ; no possession so sure, so worth while, so in- 
teresting as a piece of land. The smell of it, the 
feel of it, the call of it, intoxicate me. The rows 
are never long enough, nor the hours, nor the 
muscles strong enough either, when there is hoe- 
ing to do. 



SEED CATALOGUES 51 

Why should she not take it as a solemn duty 
to save me from the hoe? Man is an immoder- 
ate animal, especially in the spring when the 
doors of his classroom are about to open for 
him into the wide and greening fields. There is 
only one place to live, — here in the hills of 
Hingham ; and there is nothing better to do here 
or anywhere, than the hoeing, or the milking, or 
the feeding of the hens. 

A professor in the small college of Slimsalary- 
ville tells in a recent magazine of his long hair 
and no dress suit, and of his wife's doing the 
washing in order that they might have bread and 
the "Eugenic Review" on a salary of twelve 
hundred dollars a year. It is a sad story, in the 
midst of which he exclaims : " I may even get 
to the place where I can spare time (italics mine) 
to keep chickens or a cow, and that would help 
immensely; but I am so constituted that chickens 
or a cow would certainly cripple my work." How 
cripple it '? Is n't it his work to teach ? Far from 
it. " Let there be light," he says at the end of 
the essay, is his work, and he adds that he has 
been so busy with it that he is on the verge of 
a nervous break-down. Of course he is. Who 



52 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

would n't be with that job ? And of course he 
has n't a constitution for chickens and a cow. But 
neither does he seem to have constitution enough 
for the light-giving either, being ready to collapse 
from his continuous shining. 

But is n't this the case with many of us *? Are n't 
we overworking — doing our own simple job of 
teaching and, besides that, taking upon ourselves 
the Lord's work of letting there be light ? 

I have come to the conclusion that there might 
not be any less light were the Lord allowed to 
do his own shining, and that probably there 
might be quite as good teaching if the teacher 
stuck humbly to his desk, and after school kept 
chickens and a cow. The egg-money and cream 
" would help immensely," even the Professor ad- 
mits, the Professor's wife fully concurring no 
doubt. 

Don't we all take ourselves a little seriously — 
we college professors and others ? As if the Lord 
could not continue- to look after his light, if we 
looked after our students I It is only in these last 
years that I have learned that I can go forth unto 
my work and to my labor until the evening, 
quitting then, and getting home in time to feed 



SEED CATALOGUES 53 

the chickens and milk the cow. I am a profes- 
sional man, and I dwell in the midst of pro- 
fessional men, all of whom are inclined to help 
the Lord out by working after dark — all of 
whom are really in dire constitutional need of 
the early roosting chickens and the quiet, rumi- 
nating cow. 

To walk humbly with the hens, that 's the thing 
• — after the classes are dismissed and the office 
closed. To get out of the city, away from books, 
and theories, and students, and patients, and 
clients, and customers — back to real things, sim- 
ple, restful, healthful things for body and soul, 
homely domestic things that lay eggs at 70 cents 
per dozen, and make butter at $2.25 the 5-pound 
box ! As for me, this does " help immensely," 
affording me all necessary hair-cuts (I don't want 
the "Eugenic Review"), and allowing Her to 
send the family washing (except the flannels) to 
the laundry. 

Instead of crippling normal man's normal work, 
country living (chickens and a cow) will prevent 
his work from crippling him — keeping him a 
little from his students and thus saving him from 
too much teaching; keeping him from reading 



54 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

the "Eugenic Review" and thus saving him from 
too much learning ; curing him, in short, of his 
''constitution" that is bound to come to some 
sort of a collapse unless rested and saved by 
chickens and a cow. 

" By not too many chickens," she would add ; 
and there is no one to match her with a chicken 
— fried, stewed, or turned into pie. 

The hens are no longer mine, the boys having 
taken them over ; but the gardening I can't give 
up, nor the seed catalogues. 

The one in my hands was exceptionally radi- 
ant, and exceptionally full of Novelties and 
Specialties for the New Year, among them being 
an extraordinary new pole bean — an Improved 
Kentucky Wonder. She had backed away, as I 
have said, and instead of looking at the page of 
beans, looked solemnly at me ; then with some- 
thing sorrowful, something somewhat Sunday-like 
in her voice, an echo, I presume, of lessons in the 
Catechism, she asked me — 

" Who makes you plant beans ? " 

"My dear," I began, "I — " 

" How many meals of pole beans did we eat 
last summer ? " 



SEED CATALOGUES 55 

"I — don't — re — " 

"Three — just three," she answered. "And I 
think you must remember how many of that row 
of poles we picked ? " 

"Why, yes, I — " 

" Three — just three out of thirty poles ! Now, 
do you think you remember how many bushels 
of those beans went utterly unpicked *? " 

I was visibly weakening by this time. 

" Three — do you think ? " 

" Multiply that three by three-times-three I And 
now tell me — " 

But this was too much. 

"My dear," I protested, "I recollect exactly. 
It was — " 

"No, I don't believe you do. I cannot trust 
you at all with beans. But I should like to know 
why you plant ten or twelve kinds of beans when 
the only kind we like are limas ! " 

" Why — the — catalogue advises — " 

" Yes, the catalogue advises — " 

"You don't seem to understand, my dear, 
that — " 

" Now, why don't I understand ? " 

I paused. This is always a hard question, and 



56 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

peculiarly hard as the end of a series, and on a 
topic as difficult as beans. I don't know beans. 
There is little or nothing about beans in the his- 
tory of philosophy or in poetry. Thoreau says 
that when he was hoeing his beans it was not 
beans that he hoed nor he that hoed beans — 
which was the only saying that came to mind at 
the moment, and under the circumstances did 
not seem to help me much. 

" Well," I replied, fumbling among my stock 
of ready-made reasons, "I — really — don't — 
know exactly why you don't understand. Indeed, 
I really don't know — that / exactly understand. 
Everything is full of things that even I can't 
understand — how to explain my tendency to 
plant all kinds of beans, for instance; or my 
' weakness,' as you call it, for seed catalogues; 
or — " 

She opened her magazine, and I hastened to 
get the stool for her feet. As I adjusted the light 
for her she said : — 

"Let me remind you that this is the night of 
the annual banquet of your Swampatalk Club; 
you don't intend to forego that famous roast beef 
for the seed catalogues? '\ 



SEED CATALOGUES 57 

" I did n't intend to, but I must say that litera- 
ture like this is enough to make a man a vege- 
tarian. Look at that page for an old-fashioned New 
England Boiled Dinner! Such carrots. Really 
they look good enough to eat. I think I '11 plant 
some of those improved carrots; and some of 
these parsnips ; and some — " 

" You had better go get ready," she said, " and 
please put that big stick on the fire for me," 
drawing the lamp toward her, as she spoke, so 
that all of its green-shaded light fell over her — 
over the silver in her hair, with its red rose ; over 
the pink and lacy thing that wrapped her from 
her sweet throat to the silver stars on her slippers. 

"I'm not going to that Club!" I said. "I 
have talked myself for three hours to-day, attended 
two conferences, and listened to one address. 
There were three different societies for the gen- 
eral improving of things that met at the Uni- 
versity halls to-day with big speakers from the 
ends of the earth. To-morrow night I address The 
First Century Club in the city after a dinner with 
the New England Teachers of English Monthly 
Luncheon Club — and I would like to know what 
we came out here in the woods for, anyhow % " 



58 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

"If you are going — " She was speaking 
calmly. 

"Going where?" I replied, picking up the 
seed catalogues to make room for myself on the 
couch. " Please look at this pumpkin ! Think of 
what a jack-oMantern it would make for the boys I 
I am going to plant — " 

" You '11 be cold," she said, rising and drawing 
a steamer rug up over me ; then laying the open 
magazine across my shoulders while giving the 
pillow a motherly pull, she added, with a sigh of 
contentment : — 

" Perhaps, if it had n't been for me, you might 
have been a great success with pumpkins or pigs 
— I don't know." 




V 



THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 




'HERE are beaters, brooms and Bis- 
sell's Sweepers ; there are dry-mops, 
turkey-wings, whisks, and vacuum- 
cleaners; there are — but no matter. 
Whatever other things there are, and however 
many of them in the closet, the whole dust- 
raising kit is incomplete without the Dustless- 
Duster. | 

For the Dustless- Duster is final, absolute. 
What can be added to, or taken away from, a 



6o THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

Dustless-Duster ? A broom is only a broom, even 
a new broom. Its sphere is limited ; its work is 
partial. Dampened and held persistently down 
by the most expert of sweepers, the broom still 
leaves something for the Dustless-Duster to do. 
But the Dustless-Duster leaves nothing for any- 
thing to do. The dusting is done. 

Because there are many who dust, and because 
they have searched in vain for a dustless-duster, 
I should like to say that the Dustless-Duster can 
be bought at department stores, at those that have 
a full line of departments — at any department 
store, in fact; for the Dustless-Duster department 
is the largest of all the departments, whatever the 
store. Ask for it of your jeweler, grocer, milliner. 
Ask for " The Ideal," " The Universal," " The 
Indispensable," of any man with anything to sell 
or preach or teach, and you shall have it — the 
perfect thing which you have spent life looking 
for; which you have thought so often to have, 
but found as often that you had not. You shall 
have it. I have it. One hangs, rather, in the 
kitchen on the clothes-dryer. 

And one (more than one) hangs in the kitchen 
closet, and in the cellar, and in the attic. I have 



THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 6i 

often brought it home, for my search has been 
diligent since a certain day, years ago, — a "Com- 
mencement Day" at the Institute. 

I had never attended a Commencement exer- 
cise before; I had never been in an opera house 
before ; and the painted light through the roof 
of windows high overhead, the strains of the 
orchestra from far below me, the banks of broad- 
leaved palms, the colors, the odors, the confusion 
of flowers and white frocks, were strangely thrill- 
ing. Nothing had ever happened to me in the 
woods like this: the exaltation, the depression, 
the thrill of joy, the throb of pain, the awaken- 
ing, the wonder, the purpose, and the longing I It 
was all a dream — all but the form and the face 
of one girl graduate, and the title of her essay, 
" The Real and the Ideal." 

I do not know what large and lofty senti- 
ments she uttered; I only remember the way 
she looked them. I did not hear the words she 
read; but I still feel the absolute fitness of her 
theme — how real her simple white frock, her 
radiant face, her dark hair ! And how ideal ! 

I had seen perfection. Here was the absolute, 
the final, the ideal, the indispensable ! And I 



6i THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

was fourteen ! Now I am past forty ; and upon 
the kitchen clothes-dryer hangs the Dustless- 
Duster. 

No, I have not lost the vision. The daughter 
of that girl, the image of her mother, slipped 
into my classroom the other day. Nor have I 
faltered in the quest. The search goes on, and 
must go on ; for however often I get it, only to 
cast it aside, the indispensable, the ultimate, must 
continue to be indispensable and ultimate, until, 
some day — 

What matters how many times I have had it, 
to discover every time that it is only a piece of 
cheesecloth, ordinary cheesecloth, dyed black 
and stamped with red letters ? The search must 
go on, notwithstanding the clutter in the kitchen 
closet. The cellar is crowded with Dustless-Dust- 
ers, too; the garret is stuffed with them. There 
is little else besides them anywhere in the house. 
And this was an empty house when I moved into 
it, a few years ago. 

As I moved in, an old man moved out, back 
to the city whence a few years before he had 
come ; and he took back with him twelve two- 
horse wagon-loads of Dustless-Dusters. He had 



THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 63 

spent a long life collecting them, and now, having 
gathered all there were in the country, he was 
going back to the city, in a last pathetic, a last 
heroic, effort to find the one Dustless-Duster 
more. 

It was the old man's twelve two-horse loads 
that were pathetic. There were many sorts of 
things in those twelve loads, of many lands, of 
many dates, but all of one stamp. The mark was 
sometimes hard to find, corroded sometimes nearly 
past deciphering, yet never quite gone. The red 
letters were indelible on every piece, from the 
gross of antique candle-moulds (against the kero- 
sene's giving out) to an ancient coffin-plate, far 
oxidized, and engraved "Jones," which, the old 
man said, as he pried it off the side of the barn, 
"might come in handy any day." 

The old man has since died and been laid to 
rest. Upon his coffin was set a new silver plate, 
engraved simply and truthfully, " Brown." 

We brought nothing into this world, and it is 
certain, says Holy Writ, that we can carry nothing 
out. But it is also certain that we shall attempt to 
carry out, or try to find as soon as we are out, a 
Dustless-Duster. For we did bring something 



64 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

with us into this world, losing it temporarily, to 
be forever losing and finding it; and when we 
go into another world, will it not be to carry the 
thing with us there, or to continue there our 
eternal search for it ? We are not so certain of 
carrying nothing out of this world, but we are 
certain of leaving many things behind. 

Among those that I shall leave behind me is 
The Perfect Automatic Carpet-Layer. But I did 
not buy that. She did. It was one of the first of 
our perfections. 

We have more now. I knew as I entered 
the house that night that something had hap- 
pened; that the hope of the early dawn had died, 
for some cause, with the dusk. The trouble 
showed in her eyes: mingled doubt, chagrin, self- 
accusation, self-defense, defeat — familiar symp- 
toms. She had seen something, something perfect, 
and had bought it. 

I knew the look well, and the feelings all too 
well, and said nothing. For suppose I had been 
at home that day and she had been in town^ 
Still, on my trip into town that morning I ran 
the risk of meeting the man who sold me "The 
Magic Stropless Razor Salve." No, not that 



THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 65 

man I I shall never meet him again, for venge- 
ance is mine, saith the Lord. But suppose I had 
met him "? And suppose he had had some other 
salve, Safety Razor Salve this time to sell ? 

It is for young men to see visions and for old 
men to dream dreams ; but it is for no man or 
woman to buy one. 

She had seen a vision, and had bought it — 
" The Perfect Automatic Carpet-Layer," 

I kept silence, as I say, which is often a 
thoughtful thing to do. 

" Are you ill ? " she ventured, handing me my 
tea. 

"No." 

"Tired?" 

"No." 

" I hope you are not very tired, for the Par- 
sonage Committee brought the new carpet this 
afternoon, and I have started to put it down. I 
thought we would finish it this evening. It won't 
be any work at all for you, for I — I — bought 
you one of these to-day to put it down with," — 
pushing an illustrated circular across the table 
toward me. 



66 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

Any Child Can Use It 

THE PERFECT AUTOMATIC CARPET-LAYER 

No more carpet-laying bills. Do your own laying. No 
wrinkles. No crowded corners. No sore knees. No 
pounded fingers. No broken backs. Stand up and lay 
your carpet with the Perfect Automatic. Easy as sweep- 
ing. Smooth as putting paper on the wall. You hold 
the handle, and the Perfect Automatic does the rest. 
Patent Applied For. Price — 

— but it was not the price ! It was the tool — a 
weird hybrid tool, part gun, part rake, part cata- 
pult, part curry-comb, fit apparently for almost 
any purpose, from the business of blunderbuss to 
the office of an apple-picker. Its handle, which 
any child could hold, was somewhat shorter and 
thicker than a hoe-handle, and had a slotted tin 
barrel, a sort of intestine, on its ventral side along 
its entire length. Down this intestine, their points 
sticking through the slot, moved the tacks in 
single file to a spring-hammer close to the floor. 
This hammer was operated by a lever or tongue 
at the head of the handle, the connection be- 
tween the hammer at the distal end and the lever 
at the proximal end being effected by means of 



THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 67 

a steel-wire spinal cord down the dorsal side of 
the handle. Over the fist of a hammer spread a 
jaw of sharp teeth to take hold of the carpet. The 
thing could not talk ; but it could do almost any- 
thing else, so fearfully and wonderfully was it made. 

As for laying carpets with it, any child could 
do that. But we did n't have any children then, 
and I had quite outgrown my childhood. I tried 
to be a boy again just for that night. I grasped 
the handle of the Perfect Automatic, stretched 
with our united strength, and pushed down on 
the lever. The spring-hammer drew back, a little 
trap or mouth at the end of the slotted tin barrel 
opened for the tack, the tack jumped out, turned 
over, landed point downward upon the right 
spot in the carpet, the crouching hammer sprang, 
and — 

And then I lifted up the Perfect Automatic to 
see if the tack went in, — a simple act that any 
child could do, but which took automatically and 
perfectly all the stretch out of the carpet ; for the 
hammer did not hit the tack ; the tack really did 
not get through the trap; the trap did not open 
the slot; the slot — but no matter. We have no 
carpets now. The Perfect Automatic stands in 



68 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

the garret with all its original varnish on. At its 
feet sits a half-used can of "Beesene, The Prince 
of Floor Pastes." 

We have only hard- wood floors now, which we 
treated, upon the strength of the label, with this 
Prince of Pastes, "Beesene" — "guaranteed not 
to show wear or dirt or to grow gritty; water- 
proof, gravel-proof No rug will ruck on it, no 
slipper stick to it. Needs no weighted brush. 
Self-shining. The only perfect Floor Wax known. 
One box will do all the floors you have." 

Indeed, half a box did all the floors we have. 
No slipper would stick to the paste, but the paste 
would stick to the slipper ; and the greasy Prince 
did in spots all the floors we have : the laundry 
floor, the attic floor, and the very boards of the 
vegetable cellar. 

I am young yet. I have not had time to collect 
my twelve two-horse loads. But I am getting 
them fast. 

Only the other day a tall lean man came to the 
side door, asking after my four boys by name, and 
inquiring when my new book would be off the 
stocks, and, incidentally, showing me a patent- 
applied-for device called " The Fat Man's Friend." 



THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 69 

" The Friend " was a steel-wire hoop, shaped 
and jointed like a pair of calipers, but knobbed at 
its points with little metal balls. The instrument 
was made to open and spring closed about the 
Fat Man's neck, and to hold, by means of a clasp 
on each side, a napkin, or bib, spread securely 
over the Fat Man's bosom. 

" Ideal thing, now, is n't it ? " said the agent, 
demonstrating with his handkerchief. 

" Why — yes " — I hesitated — " for a fat man, 
perhaps." 

" Just so," he replied, running me over rapidly 
with a professional eye ; " but you know, Profes- 
sor, that when a man 's forty, or thereabouts, it 's 
the nature of him to stouten. Once past forty he 's 
liable to pick up any day. And when he starts, 
you know as well as I, Professor, when he starts 
there 's nothing fattens faster than a man of forty. 
You ought to have one of these * Friends ' on 
hand." 

"But fat does n't run in my family," I pro- 
tested, my helpless, single-handed condition being 
plainly manifest in my tone. 

" No matter," he rejoined, " look at me ! Six 
feet three, and thin as a lath. I 'm what you might 



70 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

call a walking skeleton, ready to disjoint, as the 
poet says, and eat all my meals in fear, which I 
would do if 't wa'n't for this little ' Friend/ I can't 
eat without it. I miss it more when I am eatin' 
than I miss the victuals. I carry one with me all 
the time. Awful handy little thing. Now — " 

"But — " I put in. 

"Certainly," he continued, with the smoothest- 
running motor I ever heard, "but here's the 
point of the whole matter, as you might say. 
^his thing is up to date, Professor. Now, the old- 
fashioned way of tying a knot in the corner of 
your napkin and anchoring it under your Adam's 
apple — that's gone by. Also the stringed bib 
and safety-pin. Both those devices were crude — 
but necessary, of course, Professor — and incon- 
venient, and that old-fashioned knot really dan- 
gerous; for the knot, pressing against the Adam's 
apple, or the apple, as you might say, trying to 
swallow the knot — well, if there isn't less apo- 
plexy and strangulation when this little Friend 
finds universal application, then I 'm no Prophet, 
as the Good Book says." 

"But you see — " I broke in. 

" I do, Professor. It 's right here. I understand 



THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 71 

your objection. But it is purely verbal and aca- 
demic, Professor. You are troubled concerning 
the name of this indispensable article. But you 
know, as well as I — even better with your edu- 
cation. Professor — that there 's nothing, abso- 
lutely nothing in a name. ' What 's in a name ? ' 
the poet says. And I '11 agree with you — though, 
of course, it 's confidential — that 'The Fat Man's 
Friend' is, as you literary folks would say, more 
or less of a mm de plume. Is n't it ? Besides, — 
if you '11 allow me the language. Professor, — 
it 's too delimiting, restricting, prejudicing. Sets 
a lean man against it. But between us. Professor, 
they 're going to change the name of the next 
batch. They 're — " 

"Indeed!" I exclaimed; "what's the next 
batch going to be % " 

" Oh, just the same — fifteen cents each — two 
for a quarter. You could n't tell them apart. You 
might just as well have one of these, and run no 
chances getting one of the next lot. They '11 be 
precisely the same ; only, you see, they 're going 
to name the next ones ' Every Bosom's Friend,' 
to fit lean and fat, and without distinction of 
sex. Ideal thing now, is n't it ? Yes, that 's right 



72 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

— - fifteen cents — two for twenty-five, Professor *? 

— don't you want another for your wife ? " 

No, I did not want another for her. But if she 
had been at home, and I had been away, who 
knows but that all six of us had come off with 
a " Friend " apiece *? They were a bargain by the 
half-dozen. 

A bargain ? Did anybody ever get a bargain 

— something worth more than he paid ? Well — 

— you shall, when you bring home a Dustless- 
Duster. 

And who has not brought it home ! Or who 
is not about to bring it home ! Not all the years 
that I have searched, not all the loads that I have 
collected, count against the conviction that at 
last I have it — the perfect thing — until I reach 
home. But with several of my perfections I have 
never yet reached home, or I am waiting an op- 
portune season to give them to my wife. I have 
been disappointed ; but let no one try to tell me 
that there is no such thing as Perfection. Is not 
the desire for it the breath of my being ? Is not 
the search for it the end of my existence*? Is 
not the belief that at last I possess it — in my- 
self, my children, my breed of hens, my religious 



THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 73 

creed, my political party — is not this conviction, 
I say, all there is of existence ? 

It is very easy to see that perfection is not in 
any of the other political parties. During a po- 
litical campaign, not long since, I wrote to a 
friend in New Jersey, — 

" Now, whatever your particular, personal brand 
of political faith, it is clearly your moral duty to 
vote this time the Democratic ticket." 

Whereupon (and he is a thoughtful, God- 
fearing man, too) he wrote back, — 

" As I belong to the only party of real reform, 
I shall stick to it this year, as I always have, and 
vote the straight ticket." 

Is there a serener faith than this human faith 
in perfection*? A surer, more unshakable belief 
than this human belief in the present possession 
of if? 

There is only one thing deeper in the heart 
of man than his desire for completeness, and that 
is his conviction of being about to attain unto 
it. He dreams of completeness by night ; works 
for completeness by day ; buys it of every agent 
who comes along ; votes for it at every election ; 
accepts it with every sermon; and finds it — 



74 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

momentarily — every time he finds himself. The 
desire for it is the sweet spring of all his satisfac- 
tions; the possession of it the bitter fountain of 
many of his woes. 

Apply the conviction anywhere, to anything — 
creeds, wives, hens — and see how it works out. 

As to hens : — 

There are many breeds of fairly good hens, 
and I have tried as many breeds as I have had 
years of keeping hens, but not until the poultry 
show, last winter, did I come upon the perfect 
hen. I had been working toward her through the 
Bantams, Brahmas, and Leghorns, to the Plym- 
outh Rocks. I had tried the White and the 
Barred Plymouth Rocks, but they were not the 
hen. Last winter I came upon the originator of 
the Buff Plymouth Rocks — and here she was ! 
I shall breed nothing henceforth but Buff Plym- 
outh Rocks. 

In the Buff Rock we have a bird of ideal size, 
neither too large nor too small, weighing about 
three pounds more than the undersized Leghorn, 
and about three pounds less than the oversized 
Brahma; we have a bird of ideal color, too — a 
single, soft, even tone, and no such barnyard 



THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 75 

daub as the Rhode Island Red; not crow-colored, 
either, like the Minorca ; nor liable to all the dirt 
of the White Plymouth Rocks. Being a beauti- 
ful and uniform buff, this perfect Plymouth Rock 
is easily bred true to color, as the vari-colored 
fowls are not. 

Moreover, the Buff Rock is a layer, is the layer, 
maturing as she does about four weeks later than 
the Rhode Island Reds, and so escaping that fatal 
early fall laying with its attendant moult and egg- 
less interim until March ! On the other hand, the 
Buff Rock matures about a month earlier than 
the logy, slow-growing breeds, and so gets a good 
start before the cold and eggless weather comes. 

And such an ^^'^ ! There are white eggs and 
brown eggs, large and small eggs, but only one 
ideal ^^^ — the Buff Rock's. It is of a soft lovely 
brown, yet whitish enough for a New York mar- 
ket, but brown enough, however, to meet the 
exquisite taste of the Boston trade. In fact it is 
neither white nor brown, but rather a delicate 
blend of the two — a new tone, indeed, a bloom 
rather, that I must call fresh-laid lavender. 

So, at least, I am told. My pullets are not yet 
laying, having had a very late start last spring. 



76 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

But the real question, speaking professionally, 
with any breed of fowls is a market question : 
How do they dress ? How do they eat *? 

If the Buff Plymouth Rock is an ideal bird in 
her feathers, she is even more so plucked. All 
white-feathered fowl, in spite of yellow legs, look 
cadaverous when picked. All dark-feathered fowl, 
with their tendency to green legs and black pin- 
feathers, look spotted, long dead, and unsavory. 
But the Buff Rock, a melody in color, shows 
that consonance, that consentaneousness, of flesh 
to feather that makes the plucked fowl to the 
feathered fowl what high noon is to the faint and 
far-off dawn — a glow of golden legs and golden 
neck, mellow, melting as butter, and all the more 
so with every unpicked pinfeather. 

Can there be any doubt of the existence of 
hen-perfection ? Any question of my having at- 
tained unto it — with the maturing of this new 
breed of hens *? 

For all spiritual purposes, that is, for all satis- 
factions, the ideal hen is the pullet — the Buff 
Plymouth Rock pullet. 

Just so the ideal wife. If we could only keep 
them pullets ! 



THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 77 

The trouble we husbands have with our wives 
begins with our marrying them. There is seldom 
any trouble with them before. Our belief in fem- 
inine perfection is as profound and as eternal as 
youth. And the perfection is just as real as the 
faith. Youth is always bringing the bride home 
— to hang her on the kitchen clothes-dryer. She 
turns out to be ordinary cheese-cloth, dyed a 
more or less fast black — this perfection that he 
had stamped in letters of indelible red ! 

The race learns nothing. I learn, but not my 
children after me. They learn only after them- 
selves. Already I hear my boys saying that their 
wives — ! And the oldest of these boys has just 
turned fourteen ! 

Fourteen ! the trouble all began at fourteen. 
No, the trouble began with Adam, though Eve 
has been responsible for much of it since. Adam 
had all that a man should have wanted in his 
perfect Garden. Nevertheless he wanted Eve. 
Eve in turn had Adam, a perfect man ! but she 
wanted something more — if only the apple tree 
in the middle of the Garden. And we all of us 
were there in that Garden — with Adam think- 
ing he was getting perfection in Eve; with Eve 



78 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

incapable of appreciating perfection in Adam. 
The trouble is human. 

" Flounder, flounder in the sea. 
Pry thee quickly come to me! 
For my wife. Dame Isabel, 
Wants strange things I scarce dare tell.** 

"And what does she want nowP" asks the 
flounder. 

"Oh, she wants to vote now," says the fisher- 
man. 

''Go home, and you shall find her with the 
ballot," sighs the flounder. " But has n't she Dust- 
less-Dusters enough already?" 

It would seem so. But once having got Adam, 
who can blame her for wanting an apple tree 
besides, or the ballot? 

'T is no use to forbid her. Yes, she has you, 
but — but Eve had Adam, too, another per- 
fect man ! Don't forbid her, for she will have it 
anyhow. It may not turn out to be all that she 
thinks it is. But did you turn out to be all that 
she thought you were? She will have a bite of 
this new apple if she has to disobey, and die for 
it, because such disobedience and death are in 
answer to a higher command, and to a larger 



THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 79 

life from within. Eve's discovery that Adam was 
cheese-cloth, and her reaching out for something 
better, did not, as Satan promised, make us as 
God; but it did make us different from all the 
other animals in the Garden, placing us even 
above the angels, — so far above, as to bring us, 
apparently, by a new and divine descent, into 
Eden. 

The hope of the race is in Eve, — in her making 
the best she can of Adam; in her clear understand- 
ing of his lame logic, — that her /^/perfections 
added to his perfections make the perfect Perfec- 
tion; and in her reaching out beyond Adam for 
something more — for the ballot now. 

If there is growth, if there is hope, if there is 
continuance, if there is immortality for the race 
and for the soul, it is to be found in this sure faith 
in the Ultimate, the Perfect, in this certain disap- 
pointment every time we think we have it; and 
in this abiding conviction that we are about to 
bring it home. But let a man settle down on per- 
fection as a present possession, and that man is 
as good as dead already — even religiously dead, 
if he has possession of a perfect Salvation. 

Now, " Sister Smith " claimed to possess Per- 



So THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

fection — a perfect infallible book of revelations 
in her King James Version of the Scriptures, and 
she claimed to have lived by it, too, for eighty 
years. I was fresh from the theological school, 
and this was my first " charge." This was my first 
meal, too, in this new charge, at the home of one 
of the official brethren, with whom Sister Smith 
lived. 

There was an ominous silence at the table for 
which I could hardly account — unless it had to 
do with the one empty chair. Then Sister Smith 
appeared and took the chair. The silence deep- 
ened. Then Sister Smith began to speak and 
everybody stopped eating. Brother Jones laid 
down his knife, Sister Jones dropped her hands into 
her lap until the thing should be over. Leaning 
far forward toward me across the table, her steady 
gray eyes boring through me, her long bony finger 
pointing beyond me into eternity. Sister Smith 
began with spaced and measured words: — 

"My young Brother — ^what — do — you — 
think — of— Jonah?" 

I reached for a doughnut, broke it, slowly, 
dipped it up and down in the cup of mustard 
and tried for time. Not a soul stirred. Not a 



THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 8i 

word or sound broke the tense silence about the 
operating-table. 

" What — do — you — think — of — Jonah? " 

"Well, Sister Smith, I—" 

"Never mind. Don't commit yourself. You 
need n't tell me what you think of Jonah. You — 
are — too — young — to — know — what — you 
— think — of — Jonah. But I will tell you what 
/ think of Jonah : if the Scriptures had said that 
Jonah swallowed the whale, it would be just as 
easy to believe as it is that the whale swallowed 
Jonah." 

"So it would, Sister Smith," I answered 
weakly, "just as easy." 

" And now, my young Brother, you preach the 
Scriptures — the old genuine inspired Authorized 
Version, word for word, just as God spoke it!" 

Sister Smith has gone to Heaven, but in spite 
of her theology. Dear old soul, she sent me many 
a loaf of her salt-rising bread after that, for she 
had as warm a heart as ever beat its brave way 
past eighty. 

But she had neither a perfect Book, nor a per- 
fect Creed, nor a perfect Salvation. She did not 
need them; nor could she have used them; for 



82 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

they would have posited a divine command to 
be perfect — a too difficult accomplishment for 
any of us, even for Sister Smith. 

There is no such divine command laid upon 
us ; but only such a divinely human need spring- 
ing up within us, and reaching out for everything, 
in its deep desire, from dust-cloths dyed black to 
creeds of every color. 

This is a life of imperfections, a world made 
of cheese-cloth, merely dyed black, and stamped 
in red letters — The Dustless-Duster. Yet a 
cheese-cloth world so dyed and stamped is better 
than a cloth-of-gold world, for the cloth-of-gold 
you would not want to dye nor to stamp with 
burning letters. 

We have never found it, — this perfect thing, 
— and perhaps we never shall. But the desire, 
the search, the faith, must not fail us, as at times 
they seem to do. At times the very tides of the 
ocean seem to fail, — when the currents cease 
to run. Yet when they are at slack here, they 
are at flood on the other side of the world, turn- 
ing already to pour back — 

*' , . . lo, out of his plenty the sea 
Pours fast ; full soon the time of the flood-tide shall be—" 



THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 83 

The faith cannot fail us — for long. Full soon 
the ebb-tide turns, 

"And Belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know" 

that there is perfection; that the desire for it is 
the breath of life ; that the search for it is the hope 
of immortality. 

But I know only in part. I see through a glass 
darkly, and I may be no nearer it now than when 
I started, yet the search has carried me far from 
that start. And if I never arrive, then, at least, 
I shall keep going on, which, in itself may be the 
thing — the Perfect Thing that I am seeking. 




VI 



SPRING PLOUGHING 




EE-S AW, Margery Daw ! 

Sold her bed and lay upon straw" 
— the very worst thing, I used to 
think, that ever happened in Moth- 
er Goose. I might steal a pig, perhaps, like Tom 
the Piper's Son, but never would I do such a 
thing as Margery did; the dreadful picture of 
her nose and of that bottle in her hand made me 
sure of that. And yet — snore on, Margery ! — I 
sold my plough and bought an automobile I As 
if an automobile would carry me 

** To the island-valley of Avilion," 

where I should no longer need the touch of the 
soil and the slow simple task to heal me of my 
grievous wound I 



SPRING PLOUGHING 85 

Speed, distance, change — are these the cure 
for that old hurt we call living, the long dull 
ache of winter, the throbbing bitter-sweet pain 
of spring? We seek for something different, 
something not different but faster and still faster, 
to fill our eyes with flying, our ears with rushing, 
our skins with scurrying, our diaphragms, which 
are our souls, with the thrill of curves, and 
straight stretches, of lifts, and drops, and sudden 
halts — as of elevators, merry-go-rounds, chutes, 
scenic railways, aeroplanes, and heavy low-hung 
cars. 

To go — up or down, or straight away — any- 
way, but round and round, and slowly — as if 
one could speed away from being, or ever travel 
beyond one's self! How pathetic to sell all that 
one has and buy an automobile ! to shift one's 
grip from the handles of life to the wheel of 
change ! to forsake the furrow for the highway, 
the rooted soil for the flying dust, the here for 
the there; imagining that somehow a car is 
more than a plough, that going is the last word 
in living — demountable rims and non-skid tires, 
the great gift of the God Mechanic, being the 
1916 model of the wings of the soul! 



86 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

But women must weep in spite of modern 
mechanics, and men must plough. Petroleum, 
with all of its by-products, cannot be served for 
bread. I have tried many substitutes for plough- 
ing; and as for the automobile, I have driven 
that thousands of miles, driven it almost daily, 
summer and winter ; but let the blackbirds re- 
turn, let the chickweed start in the garden, then 
the very stones of the walls cry out — " Plough ! 
plough ! " 

It is not the stones I hear, but the entombed 
voices of earlier primitive selves far back in my 
dim past; those, and the call of the boy I was 
yesterday, whose landside toes still turn in, per- 
haps, from walking in the furrow. When that 
call comes, no 

«« Towered cities please us then 
And the busy hum of men,'* 

or of automobiles. I must plough. It is the April 
wind that wakes the call — 

** Zephirus eek, with his sweete breeth " — 

and many hearing it long to " goon on pilgrim- 
ages," or to the Maine woods to fish, or, waiting 
until the 19th, to leave Boston by boat and go 



SPRING PLOUGHING 87 

up and down the shore to see how fared their 
summer cottages during the winter storms ; some 
even imagine they have malaria and long for bit- 
ters — as many men as many minds when 

*< The time of the singing of birds is come 
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.** 

But as for me it is neither bitters, nor cottages, 
nor trout, nor 

«*ferne halwes couth in sondry landes *' 

that I long for : but simply for the soil, for the 
warming, stirring earth, for my mother. It is back 
to her breast I would go, back to the wide sweet 
fields, to the slow-moving team and the lines 
about my shoulder, to the even furrow rolling 
from the mould-board, to the taste of the soil, the 
sight of the sky, the sound of the robins and blue- 
birds and blackbirds, and the ringing notes of 
Highhole over the sunny fields. 

I hold the plough as my only hold upon the 
earth, and as I follow through the fresh and fra- 
grant furrow I am planted with every footstep, 
growing, budding, blooming into a spirit of the 
spring. I can catch the blackbirds ploughing, I 
can turn under with my furrow the laughter of 



88 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

the flowers, the very joy of the skies. But if I so 
much as turn in my tracks, the blackbirds scatter; 
if I shout, Highhole is silent ; if I chase the 
breeze, it runs away ; I might climb into the hum- 
ming maples, might fill my hands with arbutus 
and bloodroot, might run and laugh aloud with 
the light; as if with feet I could overtake it, could 
catch it in my hands, and in my heart could hold 
it all — this living earth, shining sky, flowers, 
buds, voices, colors, odors — this spring ! 

But I can plough — while the blackbirds come 
close behind me in the furrow ; and I can be the 
spring. 

I could plough, I mean, when I had a plough. 
But I sold it for five dollars and bought a second- 
hand automobile for fifteen hundred — as every- 
body else has. So now I do as everybody else 
does, — borrow my neighbors plough, or still 
worse, get my neighbor to do my ploughing, be- 
ing still blessed with a neighbor so steadfast and 
simple as to possess a plough. But I must plough 
or my children's children will never live to have 
children, — they will have motor cars instead. 
The man who pulls down his barns and builds a 
garage is not planning for posterity. But perhaps 



SPRING PLOUGHING 89 

it does not matter; for while we are purring city- 
ward over the sleek and tarry roads, big hairy Finns 
are following the plough round and round our 
ancestral fields, planting children in the furrows, 
so that there shall be some one here when we 
have motored off to possess the land. 

I see no way but to keep the automobile and 
buy another plough, not for my children's sake 
any more than for my own. There was an old 
man living in this house when I bought it who 
moved back into the city and took with him, 
among other things, a big grindstone and two 
long-handled hayforks — for crutches, did he 
think? and to keep a cutting edge on the scythe 
of his spirit as he mowed the cobblestones? 
When I am old and my children compel me to 
move back near the asylums and hospitals, I shall 
carry into the city with me a plough ; and I shall 
pray the police to let me go every springtime to 
the Garden or the Common and there turn a 
few furrows as one whom still his mother com- 
forteth. 

It is only a few furrows that I now turn. A 
half day and it is all over, all the land ploughed 
that I own, — all that the Lord intended should be 



90 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

tilled. A half-day — but every fallow field and 
patch of stubble within me has been turned up 
in that time, given over for the rain and sunshine 
to mellow and put into tender tilth. 

No other labor, no other contact with the earth 
is like ploughing. You may play upon it, travel 
over it, delve into it, build your house down on 
it ; but when you strike into the bosom of the 
fields with your ploughshare, wounding and heal- 
ing as your feet follow deep in the long fresh 
cut, you feel the throbbing of the heart of life 
through the oaken handles as you never felt it 
before ; you are conscious of a closer union, — 
dust with dust, — of a more mystical union, — 
spirit with spirit, — than any other approach, 
work, or rite, or ceremony, can give you. You 
move, but your feet seem to reach through and 
beyond the furrow like the roots of the oak tree ; 
sun and air and soil are yours as if the blood in 
your veins were the flow of all sweet saps, oak 
and maple and willow, and your breath their 
bloom of green and garnet and gold. 

And so, until I get a new plough and a horse 
to pull it, I shall hire my neighbor — hire him 
to drive the horses, while I hold in the plough I 



SPRING PLOUGHING 91 

This is what I have come to ! Hiring another to 
skim my cream and share it! Let me handle 
both team and plough, a plough that guides it- 
self, and a deep rich piece of bottom land, and a 
furrow, — a long straight furrow that curls and 
crests like a narrow wave and breaks evenly into 
the trough of the wave before. 

But even with the hired plough, I am taking 
part in the making of spring; and more: I am 
planting me again as a tree, a bush, a mat of 
chickweed, — lowly, tiny, starry-flowered chick- 
weed, — in the earth, whence, so long ago it 
sometimes seems, I was pulled up. 

But the ploughing does more — more than 
root me as a weed. Ploughing is walking not by 
sight. A man believes, trusts, worships something 
he cannot see when he ploughs. It is an act of 
faith. In all time men have known and feared 
God; but there must have been a new and higher 
consciousness when they began to plough. They 
hunted and feared God and remained savage; 
they ploughed, trusted, and loved God — and 
became civilized. 

Nothing more primitive than the plough have 
we brought with us out of our civilized past. In 



92 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

the furrow was civilization cradled, and there, if 
anywhere, shall it be interred. 

You go forth unto your day's work, if you 
have land enough, until the Lord's appointed 
close; then homeward plod your weary way, 
leaving the world to the poets. Not yours 

"The hairy gown, the mossy cell." 

You have no need of them. 
What more 

<* Of every star that Heaven doth shew 
And every hearb that sips the dew " 

can the poet spell than all day long you have 
felt ? Has ever poet handled more of life than 
you ? Has he ever gone deeper than the bottom 
of your furrow, or asked any larger faith than 
you of your field ? Has he ever found anything 
sweeter or more satisfying than the wholesome 
toilsome round of the plough ? 




VII 
MERE BEANS 

** God himself that formed the earth and made it ; he hath 
established it ; he created it not in vain, he formed it to be 
inhabited.'* — Isaiah. 




FARMER," said my neighbor, 
Joel Moore, with considerable 
finality, "has got to get all he can, 
and keep all he gets, or die." 
" Yes," I replied with a fine platitude ; " but 
he 's got to give if he 's going to get." 

"Just so," he answered, his eye a-glitter with 
wrath as it traveled the trail of the fox across the 



94 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

dooryard ; "just so, and I '11 go halves with the 
soil ; but I never signed a lease to run this farm 
on shares with the varmints." 

" Well," said I, " I 've come out from the city 
to run my farm on shares with the whole uni- 
verse — fox and hawk, dry weather and wet, sum- 
mer and winter. I believe there is a great deal 
more to farming than mere beans. I 'm going to 
raise birds and beasts as well. I 'm going to cul- 
tivate everything, from my stone-piles up to the 
stars." 

He looked me over. I had not been long out 
from the city. Then he said, thinking doubtless 
of my stone-piles : — 

" Professor, you 've bought a mighty rich piece 
of land. And it's just as you say; there's more 
to farmin' than beans. But, as I see it, beans are 
beans any way you cook 'em ; and I think, if I 
was you, I would hang on a while yet to my 
talkin' job in the city." 

It was sound advice. I have a rich farm. I 
have raised beans that were beans, and I have 
raised birds, besides, and beasts, — a perfectly enor- 
mous crop of woodchucks; I have cultivated 
everything up to the stars; but I find it neces- 



MERE BEANS 95 

sary to hang on a while yet to my talkin* job in 
the city. 

Nevertheless, Joel is fundamentally wrong 
about the beans, for beans are not necessarily 
beans any way you cook them, nor are beans 
mere beans any way you grow them — not if I 
remember Thoreau and my extensive ministerial 
experience with bean suppers. 

As for growing mere beans — listen to Thoreau. 
He is out in his patch at Walden. 

"When my hoe tinkled against the stones, 
that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and 
was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded 
an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no 
longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed 
beans." 

Who was it, do you suppose, that hoed ? And, 
if not beans, what was it that he hoed? Well, 
poems for one thing, prose poems. If there is a 
more delightful chapter in American literature 
than that one in Walden on the bean-patch, I 
don't know which chapter it is. That patch was 
made to yield more than beans. The very stones 
were made to tinkle till their music sounded on 
the sky. 



96 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

" As / see it, beans are beans," said Joel. And 
so they are, as he sees them. 

Is not the commonplaceness, the humdrumness, 
the dead-levelness, of Hfe largely a matter of indi- 
vidual vision, "as I see it"? 

Take farm life, for instance, and how it is typi- 
fied in my neighbor I how it is epitomized, too, 
and really explained in his "beans are beans"! 
He raises beans; she cooks beans; they eat beans. 
Life is pretty much all beans. If "beans are 
beans," why, how much more is life ? 

He runs his farm on halves with the soil, and 
there the sharing stops, and consequently there 
the returns stop. He gives to the soil and the soil 
gives back, thirty, sixty, an hundredfold. What 
if he should give to the skies as well ? — to the 
wild life that dwells with him on his land? — to 
the wild flowers that bank his meadow brook ? — 
to the trees that cover his pasture slopes? Would 
they, like the soil, give anything back? 

Off against the sky to the south a succession 
of his rounded slopes shoulder their way from the 
woods out to where the road and the brook wind 
through. They cannot be tilled; the soil is too 
scant and gravelly; but they are lovely in their 



MERE BEANS 97 

gentle forms, and still lovelier in their clumps of 
mingled cedars and gray birches, scattered dark 
and sharply pointed on the blue of the sky, and 
diffuse, and soft, and gleaming white against the 
hillside's green. I cannot help seeing them from 
my windows, cannot help lingering over them — 
could not, rather ; for recently my neighbor (and 
there never was a better neighbor) sent a man over 
those hills with an axe, and piled the birches into 
cords of snowy firewood. 

It was done. I could not help it, but in my 
grief I went over and spoke to him about it. 
He was sorry, and explained the case by 
saying, — 

" Well, if there 's one kind of tree I hate more 
than another, it 's a gray birch." 

We certainly need a rural uplift. We need 
an urban uplift, too, no doubt, for I suppose 
" beans are beans " in Boston, just as they are here 
in Hingham. But it does seem the more astonish- 
ing that in the country, where the very environ- 
ment is poetry, where companionship with living 
things is constant, where even the labor of one's 
hands is cooperation with the divine forces of 
nature — the more astonishing, I say, that under 



98 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

these conditions life should so often be but bare 
existence, mere beans. 

There are many causes for this, one of them 
being an unwillingness to share largely with 
the whole of nature. "I '11 go halves with the 
soil," said my neighbor; but he did not sign a 
lease to run his farm on shares with the " var- 
mints," the fox, which stole his fine rooster, on 
this particular occasion. 

But such a contract is absolutely necessary if 
one is to get out of farm life — out of any life — 
its flowers and fragrance, as well as its pods and 
beans. And, first, one must be convinced, must 
acknowledge to one's self, that the flower and 
fragrance are needed in life, are as useful as pods 
and beans. A row of sweet peas is as neces- 
sary on the farm as a patch of the best wrinkled 
variety in the garden. 

But to come back to the fox. 

Now, I have lived long enough, and I have 
had that fox steal roosters enough, to understand, 
even feel, my neighbor's wrath perfectly. I fully 
sympathize with him. What, then, you ask, of 
my sympathy for the fox ? 

At times, I must admit, the strain has been 



MERE BEANS . 99 

very great. More than once (three times, to be 
exact) I have fired at that same fox to kill. I 
have lost many a rooster, but those I have not lost 
are many, many more. Browned to a turn, and 
garnished with parsley, a rooster is almost a poem. 
So was that wild fox, the other morning, almost 
a poem, standing on the bare knoll here near the 
house, his form half-shrouded in the early mist, 
his keen ears pricked, his pointed nose turned 
toward the yard where the hens were waking 
up. . 

Something primitive, something wild and free 
and stirring, something furtive, crafty, cunning 
— the shadow of the dark primeval forest, at 
sight of him, fell across the glaring common- 
placeness of that whole tame day. 

I will not ask, Was it worth the rooster? For 
that is too gross, too cheap a price to pay for a 
glimpse of wild life that set the dead nerves of 
the cave man in me thrilling with new life. Rather 
I would ask. Are such sights and thrills worth 
the deliberate purpose to have a woodlot, as well 
as a beanpatch and a henyard, on the farm ? 

Our American farm life needs new and better 
machinery, better methods, better buildings, bet- 



loo THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

ter roads, better schools, better stock ; but given 
all of these, and farm life must still continue to 
be earthy, material, mere beans — only more of 
them — until the farm is run on shares with all 
the universe around, until the farmer learns not 
only to reap the sunshine, but also to harvest the 
snow; learns to get a real and rich crop out of 
his landscape, his shy, wild neighbors, his inde- 
pendence and liberty, his various, difficult, yet 
strangely poetical, tasks. 

But, if farm life tends constantly to become 
earthy, so does business life, and professional life 
— beans, all of it. 

The farmers educated for mere efficiency, the 
merchants, the preachers, doctors, lawyers, edu- 
cated for mere efficiency, are educated for mere 
beans. A great fortune, a great congregation, a 
great practice, a great farm crop, are one and all 
mere beans. Efficiency is not a whole education, 
nor meat a whole living, nor the worker the 
whole man. 

And I said as much to Joel. 

"Beans," I said, "must be raised. Much of 
life must be spent hoeing the beans. But I am 
going to ask myself: ' Is it mere beans that I 



MERE BEANS loi 

am hoeing*? And is it the whole of me that is 
hoeing the beans ? ' '* 

" Well," he replied, " you settle down on that 
farm of yours as I settled on mine, and I '11 tell 
you what answer you '11 get to them questions. 
There ain't no po'try about farmin'. God did n't 
intend there should be — as I see it." 

" Now, that is n't the way I see it at all. This 
is God's earth, — and there could n't be a better 



one." 



" Of course there could n't, but there was one 



once." 



" When ? " I asked, astonished. 

" In the beginning." 

" You mean the Garden of Eden ? '* 

"Just that." 

" Why, man, this earth, this farm of yours, is 
the Garden of Eden." 

" But it says God drove him out of the Garden 
and, what 's more, it says He made him farm for 
a livin', don't it *? " 

" That 's what it says," I replied. 

" Well, then, as I see it, that settles it, don't 
it ? God puts a man on a farm when he ain't fit 
for anything else. 'Least, that 's the way I see it 



I02 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

That's how I got here, I s'pose, and I s'pose 
that 's why I stay here." 

" But," said I, " there 's another version of that 
farm story." 

" Not in the Bible *? " he asked, now beginning 
to edge away, for it was not often that I could 
get him so near to books as this. Let me talk 
books with Joel Moore and the talk lags. Farm- 
ing and neighboring are Joel's strong points, not 
books. He is a general farmer and a kind of 
universal neighbor (that being his specialty); 
on neighborhood and farm topics his mind is 
admirably full and clear. 

" That other version is in the Bible, right along 
with the one you've been citing — just before it 
in Genesis." 

He faced me squarely, a light of confidence in 
his eye, a ring of certainty, not to say triumph, 
in his tones : — 

" You 're sure of that. Professor ? " 

" Reasonably." 

" Well, I 'm not a college man, but I 've read 
the Bible. Let 's go in and take a look at Holy 
Writ on farmin'," — leading the way with alac- 
rity into the house. 



MERE BEANS 103 

" My father was a great Bible man down in 
Maine," he went on. " Let me raise a curtain. 
This was his," pointing to an immense family 
Bible, with hand-wrought clasps, that lay beneath 
the plush family album, also clasped, on a frail 
little table in the middle of the parlor floor. 

The daylight came darkly through the thick 
muslin draperies at the window and fell in a 
faint line across the floor. An oval frame of hair- 
flowers hung on the wall opposite me — a somber 
wreath of immortelles for the departed — of the 
departed — black, brown, auburn, and grizzled- 
gray, with one touch (a calla lily, I think) of the 
reddest hair I ever beheld. In one corner of the 
room stood a closed cabinet organ ; behind me, a 
tall base-burner, polished till it seemed to light 
the dimmest corners of the room. There was no 
fire in the stove ; there was no air in the room, 
only the mingled breath of soot and the hair- 
flowers and the plush album and the stuffed 
blue jay under the bell-jar on the mantelpiece, 
and the heavy brass-clasped Bible. There was 
no coffin in the room; but Joel took up the 
Bible and handed it to me as if we were having a 
funeral. 



I04 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

" Read me that other account of Adam's farm," 
he said ; " I can't see without my specs." 

In spite of a certain restraint of manner and 
evident uneasiness at the situation, he had some- 
thing of boldness, even the condescension of the 
victor toward me. He was standing and looking 
down at me; yet he stood ill at ease by the 
table. 

" Sit down, Joel," I said, assuming an authority 
in his house that I saw he could not quite feel. 

" I can't ; I 've got my overhalls on." 

" Let us do all things decently and in order, 
Joel," I continued, touching the great Book rev- 
erently. 

" But I never set in this room. My chair 's out 
there in the kitchen." 

I moved over to the window to get what light 
I could, Joel following me with furtive, sidelong 
glances, as if he saw ghosts in the dark corners. 

" We keep this room mostly for funerals," he 
volunteered, in order to stir up talk and lay what 
of the silence and the ghosts he could. 

" I '11 read your story of Adam's farming first," 
I said, and began : " These are the generations 
of the heavens and of the earth " — going on with 



MERE BEANS 105 

the account of the dry, rainless world, and with no 
man to till the soil; then to the forming of Adam 
out of the dust, and the planting of Eden; of 
the rivers, of God's mistake in trying Adam 
alone in the Garden, of the rib made into Eve, 
of the prohibited tree, the snake, the wormy 
apple, the fall, the curse, the thorns — and how, 
in order to crown the curse and make it real, 
God drove the sinful pair forth from the Garden 
and condemned them to farm for a living. 

" That 's it," Joel muttered with a mourner's 
groan. " That 's Holy Writ on farmin' as 
/ understand it. Now, where 's the other 
story?" 

" Here it is," I answered, " but we *ve got to 
have some fresh air and more light on it," rising 
as I spoke and reaching for the bolt on the front 
door. With a single quick jerk I had it back, and 
throwing myself forward, swung the door wide 
to the open sky, while Joel groaned again, and 
the big, rusty hinges thrice groaned at the surprise 
and shock of it. But the thing was done. 

A flood of warm, sweet sunshine poured over 
us; a breeze, wild-rose-and-elder-laden, swept in 
out of the broad meadow that stretched from the 



io6 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

very doorstep to a distant hill of pines, and 
through the air, like a shower in June, fell the 
notes of soaring, singing bobolinks. 

Joel stood looking out over his farm with the 
eyes of a stark stranger. He had never seen it 
from the front door before. It was a new pros- 
pect. 

" Let 's sit here on the millstone step," I said, 
bringing the Bible out into the fresh air, " and 
I '11 read you something you never heard before," 
and I read, — laying the emphasis so as to render 
a new thing of the old story, — " In the begin- 
ning God created the heaven and the earth, and 
the earth was without form and void; and dark- 
ness was upon the face of the deep. And the 
spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 
And God said. Let there be light ; and there was 
light. And God saw the light that it was good. 
And God divided the light from the darkness. 
And God called the light day, and the darkness 
he called night. 

"And the evening and the morning were the 
first day." 

Starting each new phase of the tale with "And 
God said," and bringing it to a close with " And 



MERE BEANS 107 

God saw that it was good," I read on through 
the seas and dry land, the sun and stars, and all 
living things, to man and woman — "male and 
female created he them " — and in his own like- 
ness, blessing them and crowning the blessing 
with saying, " Be fruitful and multiply and re- 
plenish the earth and subdue it," — farm for a 
living ; rounding out the whole marvelous story 
with the sweet refrain: *'And God saw every- 
thing that he had made, and behold it was very 
good. 

" And the evening and the morning were the 
sixth day." 

" "Tbus^ Joel," I concluded, glancing at him as 
with opened eyes he looked out for the first 
time over his new meadow, — " thus^ according 
to my belief, and not as you have been read- 
ing it, were the heavens and the earth finished 
and all the host of them." 

He took the old book in his lap and sat 
silent with me for a while on the step. Then he 
said : — 

"Nobody has got to the bottom of that book 
yet, have they ? And it 's true ; it 's all true. It 's 
just accordin' as you see it. Do ye know what 



io8 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

I 'm going to do ? I *m going to buy one of 
them double-seated red swings and put it right 
out here under this sassafras tree, and Hannah and 
I are going to set in, and swing in it, and listen 
a little to them bobolinks." 




VIII 



A PILGRIM FROM DUBUQUE 




T is a long road from anywhere to 
Mullein Hill, and only the rural 
postman and myself travel it at all 
frequently. The postman goes by, 
if he can, every weekday, somewhere between 
dawn and dark, the absolute uncertainty of his 
passing quite relieving the road of its wooded 
loneliness. I go back and forth somewhat regu- 
larly ; now 'and then a neighbor takes this route 
to the village, and at rarer intervals an automo- 
bile speeds over the " roller coaster road " ; but 



no THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

seldom does a stranger on foot appear so far from 
the beaten track. One who walks to Mullein Hill 
deserves and receives a welcome. 

I may be carting gravel when he comes, as I 
was the day the Pilgrim from Dubuque arrived. 
Swinging the horses into the yard with their stag- 
gering load, I noticed him laboring up the Hill 
by the road in front. He stopped in the climb for 
a breathing spell, — a tall, erect old man in black, 
with soft, high-crowned hat, and about him some- 
thing, even at the distance, that was — I don't 
know — unusual — old-fashioned — Presbyterian. 

Dropping the lines, I went down to greet the 
stranger, though I saw he carried a big blue book 
under his arm. To my knowledge no book-agent 
had ever been seen on the Hill. But had I never 
seen one anywhere I should have known this man 
had not come to sell me a book. " More likely," 
I thought, " he has come to give me a book. We 
shall see." Yet I could not quite make him out, 
for while he was surely professional, he was not 
exactly clerical, in spite of a certain Scotch- 
Covenanter-something in his appearance. He had 
never preached at men, I knew, as instinctively as 
I knew he had never persuaded them with books 



A PILGRIM FROM DUBUQUE iii 

or stocks or corner-lots in Lhassa. He had a fine, 
kindly face, that was singularly clear and simple, 
in which blent the shadows and sorrows of years 
with the serene and mellow light of good thoughts. 

" Is this Mullein Hill ? " he began, shifting the 
big blue copy of the " Edinburgh Review " from 
under his arm. 

" You 're on Mullein Hill," I replied, " and 
welcome." 

"Is — are — you Dallas Lore — " 

" Sharp ? " I said, finishing for him. " Yes, sir, 
this is Dallas Lore Sharp, but these are not his over- 
alls — not yet; for they have never been washed 
and are about three sizes too large for him." 

He looked at me, a little undone, I thought, 
disappointed, maybe, and a bit embarrassed at 
having been betrayed by overalls and rolled-up 
sleeves and shovels. He had not expected the 
overalls, not new ones, anyhow. And why are 
new overalls so terribly new and unwashed! 
Only a woman, only a man's wife, is fitted to 
buy his overalls, for she only is capable of allow- 
ing enough for shrinkage. To-day I was in my 
new pair, but not of them, not being able to get 
near enough to them for that. 



112 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

" I am getting old," he went on quickly, his 
face clearing; "my perceptions are not so keen, 
nor my memory so quick as it used to be. I 
should have known that ' good writing must have 
a pre-literary existence as lived reality ; the writ- 
ing must be only the necessary accident of its 
being lived over again in thought ' " — quoting 
verbatim, though I was slow in discovering it, 
from an essay of mine, published years before. 

It was now my turn to allow for shrinkage. 
Had he learned this passage for the visit and ap- 
plied it thus by chance? My face must have 
showed my wonder, my incredulity, indeed, for 
explaining himself he said, — 

" I am a literary pilgrim, sir — " 

" Who has surely lost his way," I ventured. 

Then with a smile that made no more allow- 
ances necessary he assured me, — 

" Oh, no, sir ! I am quite at home in the hills 
of Hingham. I have been out at Concord for a 
few days, and am now on the main road from 
Concord to Dubuque. I am Mr. Kinnier, Dr. 
Kinnier, of Dubuque, Iowa, and" — releasing 
my hand — "let me see" — pausing as we reached 
the top of the hill, and looking about in search 



A PILGRIM FROM DUBUQUE 113 

of something — "Ah, yes [to himself], there on 
the horizon they stand, those two village spires, 
'those tapering steeples where they look up to 
worship toward the sky, and look down to scowl 
across the street ' " — quoting again, word for 
word, from another of my essays. Then to me : 
" They are a little farther away and a little closer 
together than I expected to see them — too close 
[to himself again] for God to tell from which 
side of the street the prayers and praises come, 
mingling as they must in the air." 

He said it with such thought-out conviction, 
such sweet sorrow, and with such relief that I 
began now to fear for what he might quote next 
and miss from the landscape. The spires were 
indeed there (may neither one of them now be 
struck by lightning !) ; but what a terrible mem- 
ory the man has ! Had he come from Dubuque 
to prove me — 

The spires, however, seemed to satisfy him; 
he could steer by them ; and to my great relief^ 
he did not demand a chart to each of the won- 
ders of Mullein Hill — my thirty-six woodchuck 
holes, etc., etc., nor ask, as John Burroughs did, 
for a sight of the fox that performed in one of 



114 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

my books somewhat after the manner of modern 
literary foxes. Literary foxes I One or another 
of us watches this Hilltop day and night with 
a gun for literary foxes! I want no pilgrims 
from Dubuque, no naturalists from Woodchuck 
Lodge, poking into the landscape or under the 
stumps for spires and foxes and boa constrictors 
and things that they cannot find outside the book. 
I had often wondered what I would do if such 
visitors ever came. Details, I must confess, might 
on many pages be difficult to verify; but for 
some years now I have faithfully kept my four 
boys here in the woods to prove the reality of 
my main theme. 

This morning, with heaps of gravel in the 
yard, the hilltop looked anything but like the 
green and fruitful mountain of the book, still 
less like a way station between anywhere and 
Concord! And as for myself — it was no wonder 
he said to me, — 

" Now, sir, please go on with your teaming. 
I ken the lay of the land about Mullein Hill 

" < Whether the simmer kindly warms 
Wi* life and light. 
Or winter howls in gusty storms 
The lang, dark night.' " 



A PILGRIM FROM DUBUQUE 115 

But I did not go on with the teaming. Gravel 
is a thing that will wait. Here it lies where it 
was dumped by the glaciers of the Ice Age. 
There was no hurry about it ; whereas pilgrims 
and poets from Dubuque must be stopped as 
they pass. So we sat down and talked — of 
books and men, of poems and places, but mostly 
of books, — books I had written, and other books 
— great books " whose dwelling is the light of 
setting suns." Then we walked — over the ridges, 
down to the meadow and the stream, and up 
through the orchard, still talking of books, my 
strange visitor, whether the books were prose or 
poetry, catching up the volume somewhere with 
a favorite passage, and going on — reading on — 
from memory, line after line, pausing only to re- 
peat some exquisite turn, or to comment upon 
some happy thought. 

- Not one book was he giving me, but many. The 
tiny leather-bound copy of Burns that he drew 
from his coat pocket he did not give me, how- 
ever, but fondly holding it in his hands said : — 

" It was my mother's. She always read to us out 
of it. She knew every line of it by heart as I do. 
*< < Some books are lies frae end to end * — 



ii6 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

but this is no one of them. I have carried it these 
many years." 

Our walk brought us back to the house and 
into the cool living-room where a few sticks were 
burning on the hearth. Taking one of the rock- 
ing-chairs before the fireplace, the Pilgrim sat 
for a time looking into the blaze. Then he be- 
gan to rock gently back and forth, his eyes fixed 
upon the fire, quite forgetful evidently of my 
presence, and while he rocked his lips moved 
as, half audibly, he began to speak with some 
one — not with me — with some one invisible to 
me who had come to him out of the flame. I 
listened as he spoke, but it was a language that 
I could not understand. 

Then remembering where he was he turned to 
me and said, his eyes going back again beyond 
the fire, — 

"She often comes to me like this; but I am 
very lonely since she left me, — lonely — lonely 
— and so I came on to Concord to visit Thoreau's 
grave." 

And this too was language I could not under- 
stand. I watched him in silence, wondering what 
was behind his visit to me. 



A PILGRIM FROM DUBUQUE 117 

'* Thoreau was a lonely man," he went on, " as 
most writers are, I think, but Thoreau was very 
lonely." 

" Wild," Burroughs had called him ; " irritat- 
ing," I had called him ; and on the table beside 
the Pilgrim lay even then a letter from Mr. Bur- 
roughs, in which he had taken me to task on be- 
half of Thoreau. 

" I feel like scolding you a little," ran the let- 
ter, "for disparaging Thoreau for my benefit. 
Thoreau is nearer the stars than I am. I may be 
more human, but he is certainly more divine. 
His moral and ethical value I think is much 
greater, and he has a heroic quality that I cannot 
approach." 

There was something queer in this. Why had 
I not understood Thoreau *? Wild he surely was, 
and irritating too, because of a certain strain 
and self-consciousness. A "counter-irritant" he 
called himself Was this not true*? 

As if in answer to my question, as if to explain 
his coming out to Mullein Hill, the Pilgrim 
drew forth a folded sheet of paper from his 
pocket and without opening it or looking at it, 
said : — 



ii8 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

"I wrote it the other day beside Thoreau*s 
grave. You love your Thoreau — you will un- 
derstand." 

And then in a low, thrilling voice, timed as to 
some solemn chant, he began, the paper still 
folded in his hands : — 

** A lonely wand'rer stands beside the stone 

That marks the grave where Thoreau* s ashes lie; 
An object more revered than monarch's throne. 
Or pyramids beneath Egyptian sky. 

** He turned his feet from common ways of men. 
And forward went, nor backward looked around; 
Sought truth and beauty in the forest glen. 
And in each opening flower glory found. 

*' He paced the woodland paths in rain and sun; 
With joyous thrill he viewed the season's sign; 
And in the murmur of the meadow run 
With raptured ear he heard a voice divine. 

" Truth was the beacon ray that lured him on. 
It lit his path on plain and mountain height. 
In wooded glade and on the flow'ry lawn — 
Where'er he strayed, it was his guiding light. 

'* Close by the hoary birch and swaying pine 
To Nature's voice he bent a willing ear; 
And there remote from men he made his shrine. 
Her face to see, her many tongues to hear. 



A PILGRIM FROM DUBUQUE 119 

«* The robin piped his morning song for him ; 
The wild crab there exhaled its rathe perfume ; 
The loon laughed loud and by the river's brim 
The water willow waved its verdant plume. 

** For him the squirrels gamboled in the pines. 

And through the pane the morning sunbeams glanced ; 
The zephyrs gently stirred his climbing vines 
And on his floor the evening shadows danced. 

«* To him the earth was all a fruitful field. 
He saw no barren waste, no fallow land ; 
The swamps and mountain tops would harvests yield j 
And Nature's stores he garnered on the strand. 

** There the essential facts of life he found. 

The full ripe grain he winnowed from the chaff; 
And in the pine tree, — rent by lightning round. 
He saw God's hand and read his autograph. 

"Against the fixed and complex ways of life 
His earnest, transcendental soul rebelled ; 
And chose the path that shunned the wasted strife. 
Ignored the sham, and simple Hfe upheld. 

** Men met him, looked and passed, but knew him not. 
And critics scoffed and deemed him not a seer. 
He lives, and scoff and critic are forgot ; 
We feel his presence and his words we hear. 

** He passed without regret, — oft had his breath 
Bequeathed again to earth his mortal clay. 
Believing that the darkened night of death 
Is but the dawning of eternal day." 



I20 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

The chanting voice died away and — the 
woods were still. The deep waters of Walden 
darkened in the long shadows of the trees that 
were reaching out across the pond. Evening was 
close at hand. Would the veerysing again? Or 
was it the faint, sweet music of the bells of Lin- 
coln, Acton, and Concord that I heard, humming 
in the pine needles outside the window, as if they 
were the strings of a harp? 

The chanting voice died away and — the room 
was still; but I seem to hear that voice every 
time I open the pages of " The Week " or " Wal- 
den." And the other day, as I stood on the shores 
of the pond, adding my stone to the cairn where 
the cabin used to stand, a woodthrush off in the 
trees (trees that have grown great since Thoreau 
last looked upon them), began to chant — or 
was it the Pilgrim from Dubuque ? — 

** Truth was the beacon ray that lured him on. 
It lit his path on plain and mountain height. 
In wooded glade and on the flow*ry lawn — 
Where'er he strayed, it was his guiding light." 




IX 

THE HONEY FLOW 




ND this our life, exempt from public 
haunt and those swift currents that 
carry the city-dweller resistlessly 
into the movie show, leaves us 
caught in the quiet eddy of little unimportant 
things, — digging among the rutabagas, playing 
the hose at night, casting the broody hens into 
the " dungeon," or watching the bees. 

Many hours of my short life I have spent 
watching the bees, — blissful, idle hours, saved 
from the wreck of time, hours fragrant of white 
clover and buckwheat and filled with the honey 
of nothing-to-do ; every minute of them capped, 
like the comb within the hive, against the com- 
ing winter of my discontent. If, for the good of 



I22 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

mankind, I could write a new Commandment 
to the Decalogue, it would read : Thou shalt keep 
a hive of bees. 

Let one begin early, and there is more health 
in a hive of bees than in a hospital; more honey, 
too, more recreation and joy for the philosophic 
mind, though no one will deny that very many 
persons prepare themselves both in body and 
mind for the comforting rest and change of the 
hospital with an almost solemn joy. 

But personally I prefer a hive of bees. They 
are a sure cure, it is said, for rheumatism, the 
patient making bare the afflicted part, then with 
it stirring up the bees. But it is saner and happier 
to get the bees before you get the rheumatism and 
prevent its coming. No one can keep bees with- 
out being impressed with the wisdom of the ounce 
of prevention. 

I cannot think of a better habit to contract 
than keeping bees. What a quieting, pastoral 
turn it gives to life ! You can keep them in the 
city — on the roof or in the attic — just as you 
can actually live in the city, if you have to; but 
bees, even more than cows, suggest a rural pros- 
pect, old-fashioned gardens, pastures, idyls, — 



THE HONEY FLOW 123 

things out of Virgil, and Theocritus — and out 
of Spenser too, — 

** And more, to lulle him in his slumber soft, 
A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe. 
And ever drizling raine upon the loft, 
Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne 
Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne: 
No other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes. 
As still are wont t* annoy the walled towne 
Might there be heard: but carelesse Quiet lyes. 
Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enimyes *' 

that is not the land of the lotus, but of the melli- 
lotus^ of lilacs, red clover, mint, and goldenrod — 
a land of honey-bee. Show me the bee-keeper and 
I will show you a poet ; a lover of waters that go 
softly like Siloa; with the breath of sage and 
pennyroyal about him; an observer of nature, who 
can handle his bees without veil or gloves. Only 
a few men keep bees, — only philosophers, I have 
found. They are a different order utterly from 
hen-men, bee-keeping and chicken-raising being 
respectively the poetry and prose of country life, 
though there are some things to be said for the hen, 
deficient as the henyard is in euphony, rhythm, 
and tune. 

In fact there is not much to be said for the 



124 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

bee, not much that the public can understand; 
for it is neither the bee nor the eagle that is the 
true American bird, but the rooster. In one of 
my neighboring towns five thousand petitioners 
recently prayed the mayor that they be allowed to 
let their roosters crow. The petition was granted. 
In all that town, peradventure, not five bee-keep- 
ers could be found, and for the same reason that 
so few righteous men were found in Sodom. 

Bee-keeping, like keeping righteous, is exceed- 
ingly difficult; it is one of the fine arts, and no dry- 
mash-and-green-bone affair as of hens. Queens 
are a peculiar people, and their royal households, 
sometimes an hundred thousand strong, are as 
individual as royal houses are liable to be. 

I have never had two queens alike, never two 
colonies that behaved the same, never two seasons 
that made a repetition of a particular handling 
possible. A colony of bees is a perpetual problem; 
the strain of the bees, the age and disposition of 
the queen, the condition of the colony, the state 
of the weather, the time of the season, the little- 
understood laws of the honey-flow, — these 
singly, and often all in combination, make the 
wisest handling of a colony of bees a question 



THE HONEY FLOW 125 

fresh every summer morning and new every 
evening. 

For bees should be "handled," that is, bees 
left to their own devices may make you a little 
honey — ten to thirty pounds in the best of sea- 
sons; whereas rightly handled they will as easily 
make you three hundred pounds of pure comb 
honey — food of prophets, and with saleratus 
biscuit instead of locusts, a favorite dish with the 
sons of prophets here on Mullein Hill. 

Did you ever eat apple-blossom honey*? Not 
often, for it is only rarely that the colony can be 
built up to a strength sufficient to store this 
earliest flow. But I have sometimes caught it; 
and then as the season advances, and flow after 
flow comes on with the breaking of the great 
floral waves, I get other flavors, — pure white 
clover, wild raspberry, golden sumac, pearly 
white clethra, buckwheat, black as axle grease, 
and last of all, the heavy, rich yellow of the 
goldenrod. These, by careful watching, I get 
pure and true to flavor like so many fruit ex- 
tracts at the soda fountains. 

Then sometimes the honey for a whole season 
will be adulterated, not by anything that I have 



126 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

done, but by the season's peculiar conditions, or 
by purely local conditions, — conditions that may 
not prevail in the next town at all. 

One year it began in the end of July. The 
white clover flow was over and the bees were 
beginning to work upon the earliest blossoms of 
the dwarf sumac. Sitting in front of the hives 
soon after the renewed activity commenced, I 
noticed a peculiarly rank odor on the air, and 
saw that the bees in vast numbers were rising and 
making for a pasture somewhere over the sprout- 
land that lay to the north of the hives. Yet 
I felt sure there was nothing in blossom in that 
direction within range of my bees (they will fly 
off two miles for food) ; nothing but dense hard- 
wood undergrowth from stumps cut some few 
years before. 

Marking their line of flight I started into the 
low jungle to find them. I was half a mile in 
when I caught the busy hum of wings. I looked 
but could see nothing, — not a flower of any 
sort, nothing but oak, maple, birch, and young 
pine saplings just a little higher than my head. 
But the air was full of bees ; yet not of swarm- 
ing bees, for that is a different and unmistakable 



THE HONEY FLOW 127 

hum. Then I found myself in the thick of a 
copse of witch-hazel up and down the stems of 
which the bees were wildly buzzing. There was 
no dew left on the bushes, so it was not that they 
were after; on looking more closely I saw that 
they were crawling down the stems to the little 
burrs containing the seed of last fall's flowering. 
Holding to the top of the burr with their hind 
legs they seemed to drink head down from out 
of the base of the burr. 

Picking one of these, I found a hole at its 
base, and inside, instead of seeds, a hollow filled 
with plant lice or aphides, that the bees were milk- 
ing. Here were big black ants, too, and yellow 
wasps drinking from the same pail. 

But a bee's tongue, delicate as it is, would 
crush a fragile plant louse. I picked another 
burr, squeezing it gently, when there issued from 
the hole at the base a drop of crystal-clear liquid, 
held in the thinnest of envelopes, which I tasted 
and found sweet. In burr after burr I found these 
sacks or cysts of sweets secreted by the aphides 
for the bees to puncture and drain. The largest 
of them would fill a bee at a draught. Some of 
the burrs contained big fat grubs of a beetle 



128 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

unknown to me, — the creature that had eaten 
the seeds, bored the hole at the base, and left the 
burr cleaned and garnished for the aphides. These 
in turn invited the bees, and the bees, carrying 
this "honey-dew" home, mixed it with the pure 
nectar of the flowers and spoiled the crop. 

Can you put stoppers into these millions of 
honey-dew jugs ? Can you command your bees 
to avoid these dire bushes and drink only of the 
wells at the bottoms of the white-clover tubes ? 
Hardly that, but you can clip the wing of your 
queen and make her obedient; you can com- 
mand the colony not to swarm, not to waste its 
strength in drones, and you can tell it where and 
how to put this affected honey so that the pure 
crop is not spoiled ; you can order the going out 
and coming in of those many thousands so that 
every one is a faithful, wise, and efficient servant, 
gathering the fragrance and sweet of the summer 
from every bank whereon the clover and the wild 
mints blow. 

Small things these for a man with anything to 
do ? Small indeed, but demanding large love and 
insight, patience, foresight, and knowledge. It 
does not follow that a man who can handle a 



THE HONEY FLOW 129 

colony of bees can rule his spirit or take a city, 
but the virtues absolutely necessary to the bee- 
keeper are those required for the guiding of na- 
tions; and there should be a bee-plank incorpo- 
rated into every party platform, promising that 
president, cabinet, and every member of congress 
along with the philosophers shall keep bees. 




X 

A PAIR OF PIGS 




DROPPED down beside Her on 
the back steps and took a handful 
of her peas to pod. She set the 
colander between us, emptied half 
of her task into my hat, and said : — 

" It is ten o'clock. I thought you had to be 
at your desk at eight this morning? And you 
are hot and tired. What is it you have been do- 
ing?" 

" Getting ready for the pigs'^ I replied, laying 
marked and steady emphasis on the plural. 

"You are putting the pods among the peas 
and the peas with the pods" — and so I was. 
" Then we are going to have another pig," she 
went on. 

" No, not a pig this time ; I think I *ll get a 



A PAIR OF PIGS 131 

pair. You see while you are feeding one you can 
just as well be feeding — " 

"A lot of them," she said with calm convic- 
tion. 

" You 're right ! " I exclaimed, a little eagerly. 
" Besides two pigs do better than — " 

" Well, then," very gravely and never pausing 
for an instant in her shelling, " let 's fence in the 
fourteen acres and have a nice little piggery of 
Mullein Hill." 

The pods popped and split in her nimble fin- 
gers as if she knew a secret spring in their backs. 
I can beat her picking peas, but in shelling peas 
she seems to have more fingers than I have ; they 
quite confuse me at times as they twinkle at their 
task. 

So they did now. I had spent several weeks 
working up my brief for two pigs ; but was ut- 
terly unprepared for a whole piggery. The sud- 
denness of it, the sweep and compass of it, left 
me powerless to pod the peas for a moment. 

I ought to have been at my writing, but it 
was too late to mention that now; besides here 
was my hat still full of peas. I could not ungal- 
lantly dump them back into her empty pan and 



132 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

quit. There was nothing for it but to pod on and 
stop with one pig. But my heart was set on a 
pair of pigs. College had just closed (we were 
having our 17th of June peas) and the joy of the 
farm was upon me. I had a cow and a heifer, 
eighty-six hens, three kinds of bantams, ten hives 
of bees, and two ducks. I was planning to build 
a pigeon coop, and had long talked of turning 
the nine-acre ridge of sprout land joining my 
farm into a milch goat pasture, selling the milk 
at one dollar a quart to Boston babies; I had 
thought somewhat of Belgian hares and black 
foxes as a side-line ; and in addition to these my 
heart was set on a pair of pigs. 

" Why won't one pig do ? " she would ask. 
And I tried to explain ; but there are things that 
cannot be explained to the feminine mind, things 
perfectly clear to a man that you cannot make a 
woman see. 

Pigs, I told her, naturally go by pairs, like twins 
and scissors and tongs. They do better together, 
as scissors do. Nobody ever bought a scissor. Cer- 
tainly not. pigs need the comfort of one another's 
society, and the diversion of one another to take 
up their minds in the pen; hens I explained were 



A PAIR OF PIGS 133 

not the only broody creatures, for all animals 
show the tendency, and does not the Preacher 
say, "Two are better than one: if two lie together 
then have they heat : but how can one be warm 
alone"? 

I was sure, I told her, that the Preacher had 
pigs in mind, forjudging by the number of pig- 
prohibitions throughout Hebrew literature, they 
must have had pigs constantly in mind. This 
observation of the early Hebrew poet and preacher 
is confirmed, I added, by all the modern agri- 
cultural journals, as well as by all our knowing 
neighbors. Even the Flannigans (an Irish family 
down the road), — even th€ Flannigans, I pointed 
out, always have two pigs, for all their eight chil- 
dren and his job tending gate at the railroad cross- 
ing. They have a goat, too. If a man with that 
sort of job can have eight children and a goat 
and two pigs, why can't a college professor have 
a few of the essential, elementary things, I 'd like 
to know? 

" Do you call your four boys a/^ze; ? " she asked. 

" I don't call my four Flannigan's eight," I 
replied, "nor my one pig his two. Flannigan has 
the finest pigs on the road. He has a wonderful 



134 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

way with a pair of pigs — something he inherited, 
I suppose, for I imagine there have been pigs in 
the Flannigan family ever since — " 

"They were kings in Ireland," she put in 
sweetly. 

" Flannigan says," I continued, " that I ought 
to have two pigs : ' For shure, a pair o' pags is 
double wan pag,' says Flannigan — good clear 
logic it strikes me, and quite convincing." 

She picked up the colander of shelled peas 
with a sigh. " We shall want the new potatoes 
and fresh salmon to go with these," her mind not 
on pigs at all, but on the dinner. " Can't you dig 
me a few ? " 

"I might dig up a few fresh salmon," I replied, 
" but not any new potatoes, for they have just got 
through the ground." 

" But if I wanted you to, could n't you ? " 

" I don't see how I could if there are n't any 
to dig." 

"But won't you go look — dig up a few hills 
— you can't tell until you look. You said you 
did n't leave the key outside in the door yester- 
day when we went to town, but you did. And 
as for a lot of pigs — " 



A PAIR OF PIGS 135 

" I don't want a lot of pigs,'* I protested. 

"But you do, though. You want a lot of 
everything. Here you 've planted five hundred 
cabbages for winter just as if we were a sauerkraut 
factory — and the probabilities are we shall go to 
town this winter — " 

" Go where ! " I cried. 

" And as for pigs, your head is as full of pigs 
as Deerfoot Farm or the Chicago stockyards — 

Mullein Hill Sausages 
Made of Little Pigs 

that's really your dream" — spelling out the 
advertisement with pea-pods on the porch floor. 

" Now, don't you think it best to save some 
things for your children, — this sausage business, 
say, — and you go on with your humble themes 
and books'?" 

She looked up at me patiently, sweetly in- 
scrutable as she added : — 

" You need a pig, Dallas, one pig, I am quite 
sure ; but two pigs are nothing short of the pig 
business, and that is not what we are living here 
on Mullein Hill for." 

She went in with her peas and left me with my 



136 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

pigs — or perhaps they were her thoughts ; leav- 
ing thoughts around being a habit of hers. 

What did she mean by my needing a pig? 
She was quite sure I needed one pig. Is it my 
own peculiar, personal need? That can hardly 
be, for I am not different from other men. There 
may be in all men, deep down and unperceived, 
except by their wives, perhaps, traits and tend- 
encies that call for the keeping of a pig. I think 
this must be so, for while she has always said we 
need the cow or the chickens or the parsley, she 
has never spoken so of the pig, it being referred 
to invariably as mine, until put into the cellar in 
a barrel. 

The pig as my property, or rather as my pecu- 
liar privilege, is utterly unrelated in her mind 
to salt pork. And she is right about that. No 
man needs a pig to put in a barrel. Everybody 
knows that it costs less to buy your pig in the 
barrel. And there is little that is edifying about 
a barrel of salt pork. I always try to fill my mind 
with cheerful thoughts before descending into the 
dark of the cellar to fish a cold, white lump of 
the late pig out of the pickle. 

Not in the uncertain hope of his becoming 



A PAIR OF PIGS 137 

pork, but for the certain present joy of his being 
pork, does a man need a pig. In all his other 
possessions man is always to be blest. In the pig 
he has a constant, present reward : because the 
pig is and there is no question as to what he 
shall be. He is pork and shall be salt pork, not 
spirit, to our deep relief 

Instead of spirit the pig is clothed upon with 
lard, a fatty, opaque, snow-white substance, that 
boils and grows limpid clear and flames with 
heat; and while not so volatile and spirit-like as 
butter, nevertheless it is one of earth's pure es- 
sences, perfected, sublimated, not after the soul 
with suffering, but after the flesh with corn and 
solid comfort — the most abundant of one's pos- 
sessions, yet except to the pig the most difficult 
of all one's goods to bestow. 

The pig has no soul. I am not so sure of the 
flower in the crannied wall, not so sure of the 
very stones in the wall, so long have they been, 
so long shall be; but the pig — no one ever 
plucked up a pig from his sty to say, — 

<* I hold you here squeal and all, in my hand. 
Little pig — but ifl could understand 
What you are, squeal and all, and all in all '* — 



138 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

No poet or philosopher ever did that. But they 
have kept pigs. Here is Matthew Arnold writing 
to his mother about Literature and Dogma and 
poems and — "The two pigs are grown very large 
and handsome, and Peter Wood advises us to 
fatten them and kill our own bacon. We con- 
sume a great deal of bacon, and Flu complains 
that it is dear and not good, so there is much to 
be said for killing our own; but she does not 
seem to like the idea." 

" Very large and handsome " — this from the 
author of 

"The evening comes, the fields are still!*' 

And here is his wife, again, not caring to have 
them killed, finding, doubtless, a better use for 
them in the pen, seeing that Matthew often went 
out there to scratch them. 

Poets, I say, have kept pigs, for a change, I 
think, from their poetry. For a big snoring pig 
is not a poem, whatever may be said of a little 
roast pig; and what an escape from books and 
people and parlors (in this country) is the feed- 
ing and littering and scratching of him ! You put 
on your old clothes for him. He takes you out 
behind the barn; there shut away from the prying 



A PAIR OF PIGS 139 

gaze of the world, and the stern eye, conscience, 
you deliberately^fill him, stuff him, fatten him, till 
he grunts, then you scratch him to keep him grunt- 
ing, yourself reveling in the sight of the flesh in- 
dulged, as you dare not indulge any other flesh. 
You would love to feed the whole family that 
way; only it would not be good for them. You 
cannot feed even the dog or the horse or the hens 
so. One meal a day for the dog; a limited ra- 
tion of timothy for the horse, and scraUb-ftcd for 
the hens — feed to compel them to scratch for 
fear they will run to flesh instead of eggs; and 
the children's wedge of pie you sharpen though 
the point of it pierces your soul; and the potato 
you leave off of her plate ; and you forgo your — 
you get you a medicine ball, I should say, in 
order to keep down the fat lest it overlie and 
smother the soul. 

Compelled to deny and subject the body, what 
do I then but get me a pig and feed //, and scratch 
it, and bed it in order to see it fatten and to hear 
it snore? The flesh cries out for indulgence; but 
the spirit demands virtue; and a pig, being the 
virtue of indulgence, satisfies the flesh and is 
winked at by the soul. 



I40 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

If a pig is the spirit's concession to the flesh, no 
less is he at times a gift to the spirit. There are 
times in life when one needs just such compan- 
ionship as the pig's, and just such shelter as one 
finds within his pen. After a day in the classroom 
discoursing on the fourth dimension of things 
in general, I am prone to feel somewhat re- 
moved, at sea somewhat. 

Then I go down and spread my arms along 
the fence and come to anchor with the pig. 



U uj 




^^-M' 



XI 
LEAFING 




;OETS, I said, have kept pigs for 
an escape from their poetry. But 
keeping pigs is not all prose. I put 
my old clothes on to feed him, it is 
true ; he takes me out behind the barn ; but he 
also takes me one day in the year out into the 
woods — a whole day in the woods — with rake 
and sacks and hay-rig, and the four boys, to gather 
him leaves for bedding. 

Leafing Day is one of the days in red on the 
Mullein Hill Calendar; and of all our days in 
the woods surely none of them is fresher, more 



142 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

fragrant, more joyous, and fuller of poetry than 
the day we go to rake and sack and bring home 
the leaves for the pig. 

You never went after leaves for the pigs? Per- 
haps you never even had a pig. But a pig is worth 
having, if only to see the comfort he takes in the 
big bed of dry leaves you give him in the sunny 
corner of his pen. And, if leafing had no other 
reward, the thought of the snoozing, snoring pig 
buried to his winking snout in the bed, would 
give joy and zest enough to the labor. 

But leafing like every other humble labor of 
our life here in the Hills of Hingham has its own 
reward, — and when you can say that of any 
labor you are speaking of its poetry. 

We jolt across the bumpy field, strike into the 
back wood-road, and turnoffupon an old stumpy 
track over which cordwood was carted years ago. 
Here in the hollow at the foot of a high wooded 
hill the winds have whirled the oak and maple 
leaves into drifts almost knee-deep. 

We are oflf the main road, far into the heart 
of the woods. We straddle stumps, bend down 
saplings, stop while the horse takes a bite of 
sweet birchj tack and tip and tumble and back 



LEAFING 143 

through the tight squeezes between the trees ; and 
finally, after a prodigious amount of "whoa"- 
ing and " oh"- ing and squealing and screeching, 
we land right side up and so headed that we can 
start the load out toward the open road. 

You can yell all you want to when you go 
leafing, yell at every stump you hit, yell every 
time a limb knocks off your hat or catches you 
under the chin, yell when the horse stops suddenly 
to browse on the twigs, and stands you meekly on 
your head in the bottom of the rig. You can 
screech and howl and yell like the wild Indian 
that you are; you can dive and wrestle in the 
piles of leaves, and cut all the crazy capers you 
know; for this is a Saturday; these are the wild 
woods and the noisy leaves; and who is there 
looking on besides the mocking jays and the 
crows ^ 

The leaves pile up. The wind blows keen 
among the tall, naked trees; the dull clouds hang 
low above the ridge ; and through the cold gray 
of the maple swamp below peers the ghostly face 
of Winter. 

You start up the ridge with your rake, and 
draw down another pile, thinking, as you work. 



144 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

of the pig. The thought is pleasing. The warm 
glow all over your body strikes in to your heart. 
You rake away as if it were your own bed you 
were gathering — as really it is. He that rakes 
for his pig rakes also for himself A merciful 
man is merciful to his beast, and he that gathers 
leaves for his pig spreads a blanket of down over 
his own winter bed. 

Is it to warm my feet on winter nights that I 
pull on my boots at ten o'clock and go my round 
at the barn ? Yet it does warm my feet, through 
and through, to look into the stalls and see the 
cow chewing her cud, and the horse cleaning up 
his supper hay, standing to his fetlocks in his 
golden bed of new rye-straw; and then, going to 
the pig's pen, to hear him snoring louder than 
the north wind, somewhere in the depths of his 
leaf-bed, far out of sight. It warms my feet, it 
also warms my heart. 

So the leaves pile up. How good a thing it is 
to have a pig to work for ! What zest and pur- 
pose it lends to one's raking and piling and stor- 
ing ! If I could get nothing else to spend myself 
on, I should surely get me a pig. Then, when I 
went to walk in the woods, I should be obliged 



LEAFING 145 

occasionally to carry a rake and a bag with me, 
much better things to take into the woods than 
empty hands, and sure to scratch into light a 
number of objects that would never come within 
the range of opera-glass or gun or walking-stick. 
To see things through a twenty-four-toothed rake 
is to see them very close, as through a microscope 
magnifying twenty-four diameters. 

And so, as the leaves pile up, we keep a sharp 
lookout for what the rake uncovers ; here under 
a rotten stump a hatful of acorns, probably gath- 
ered by the white-footed wood-mouse. For the 
stump ''gives" at the touch of the rake, and a 
light kick topples it down hill, spilling out a big 
nest of feathers and three dainty little creatures 
that scurry into the leaf-piles like streaks of day- 
light. They are the white-footed mice, long-tailed, 
big-eared, and as clean and high-bred-looking as 
greyhounds. 

Combing down the steep hillside with our 
rakes, we dislodge a large stone, exposing a black 
patch of fibrous roots and leaf-mould, in which 
something moves and disappears. Scooping up a 
double handful of the mould, we capture a little 
red-backed salamander. 



146 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

Listen ! Something piping ! Above the rustle 
of the leaves we, too, hear a " fine, plaintive " 
sound — no, a shrill and ringing little racket, 
rather, about the bigness of a penny whistle. 

Dropping the rake, we cautiously follow up 
the call (it seems to speak out of every tree- 
trunk !) and find the piper clinging to a twig, no 
salamander at all, but a tiny wood- frog, Picker- 
ing's hyla, his little bagpipe blown almost to 
bursting as he tries to rally the scattered summer 
by his tiny, mighty " skirl." Take him nose and 
toes, he is surely as much as an inch long; not 
very large to pipe against this north wind that 
has been turned loose in the bare woods. 

We go back to our raking. Above us, among 
the stones of the slope, hang bunches of Christ- 
mas fern ; around the foot of the trees we uncover 
trailing clusters of gray-green partridge vine, 
glowing with crimson berries; we rake up the 
prince's-pine, pipsissewa, creeping-Jennie, and 
wintergreen red with ripe berries — a whole bou- 
quet of evergreens, exquisite, fairy-like forms 
that later shall gladden our Christmas table. 

But how they gladden and cheer the October 
woods! Summer dead*? Hope all gone? Life 



LEAFING 147 

vanished away ? See here, under this big pine, a 
whole garden of arbutus, green and budded, al- 
most ready to bloom! The snows shall come 
before their sweet eyes open; but open they will 
at the very first touch of spring. We will gather 
a few, and let them wake up in saucers of clean 
water in our sunny south windows. 

Leaves for the pig, and arbutus for us ! We 
make a clean sweep down the hillside "jumping " 
a rabbit from its form under a brush-pile, dis- 
covering where a partridge roosts in a low-spread- 
ing hemlock; coming upon a snail cemetery in 
a hollow hickory stump ; turning up a yellow- 
jackets' nest built two thirds underground; tracing 
the tunnel of a bobtailed mouse in its purpose- 
less windings in the leaf-mould, digging into a 
woodchuck's — 

" But come, boys, get after those bags ! It is 
leaves in the hay-rig we want, not woodchucks 
at the bottom of woodchuck-holes." 

Two small boys catch up a bag, and hold it 
open, while two more stuff in the crackling leaves. 
Then I come along with my big feet, and pack 
the leaves in tight, and on to the rig goes the 
bulging bag. 



148 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

Exciting ? If you can't believe it exciting, hop 
up on the load, and let us jog you home. Swish ! 
bang ! thump ! tip ! turn ! joggle ! jolt ! Hold on 
to your ribs. Pull in your popping eyes. Look 
out for the stump ! Is n't it fun to go leafing *? 
Is n't it fun to do anything that your heart does 
with you ? — even though you do it for a pig ! 

Just watch the pig as we shake out the bags 
of leaves. See him caper, spin on his toes, shake 
himself, and curl his tail. That curl is his laugh. 
We double up and weep when we laugh hard; 
but the pig can't weep, and he can't double him- 
self up ; so he doubles up his tail. There is where 
his laugh comes off, curling and kinking in little 
spasms of pure pig joy. 

" Boosh ! Boosh ! " he snorts, and darts around 
the pen like a whirlwind, scattering the leaves in 
forty ways, to stop short — the shortest stop ! — 
and fall to rooting for acorns. 

He was once a long-tusked boar of the forest, 
this snow-white, sawed-off, pug-nose little porker 
of mine — ages and ages ago. But he still re- 
members the smell of the forest leaves ; he still 
knows the taste of the acorn-mast ; he is still wild 
pig somewhere deep down within him. 



LEAFING 149 

And we were once long-haired, strong-limbed 
savages who roamed the forest for him — ages 
and ages ago. And we, too, like him, remember 
the smell of the fallen leaves, and the taste of the 
forest fruits, and of pig, roast pig. And if the pig 
in his heart is still a wild boar, no less are we at 
times wild savages in our hearts. 

Anyhow, for one day in the fall I want to go 
leafing. I want to give my pig a taste of acorns, 
and a big pile of leaves to dive so deep into that 
he cannot see his pen. No, I do not live in a 
pen ; I do not want to ; but surely I might, if 
once in a while I did not go leafing, did not 
escape now and then from my little penned-in, 
daily round into the wide, sweet woods, my an- 
cestral home. 




XII 
THE LITTLE FOXES 




WAS picking strawberries down 
by the woods when some one called 
out from the road : — 

" Say, ain't they a litter of young 
foxes somewheres here in the ridges ? " 

I recognized the man as one of the chronic 
fox-hunters of the region, and answered : — 

" I 'm sure of it, by the way an old she-fox has 
pestered my chickens lately." 

" Well, she won't pester them no more. She 's 
been trapped and killed. Any man that would 
kill a she-fox this time o' year and let her pups 
starve to death, he ain't no better than a brute, 
he ain't. I 've hunted two days for 'em ; and I '11 
hunt till I find 'em." And he disappeared into 



THE LITTLE FOXES 151 

the woods, on my side of the road, upon a quest 
so utterly futile, apparently, and so entirely 
counter to the notion I had had of the man, that 
I stopped my picking and followed him up the 
ridge, just to see which way a man would go to 
find a den of suckling foxes in all the miles and 
miles of swamp and ledgy woodland that spread 
in every direction about him. I did not see which 
way he went, for by the time I reached the crest 
he had gone on and out of hearing through the 
thick sprout-land. I sat down, however, upon a 
stump to think about him, this man of the shoe- 
shop, working his careful way up and down the 
bushy slopes, around the granite ledges, across the 
bogs and up-grown pastures, into the matted 
green-brier patches, hour after hour searching for 
a hole in the ground a foot wide, for a den of little 
foxes that were whimpering and starving because 
their mother did not return. 

He found them — two miles away in the next 
town, on the edge of an open field, near a public 
road, and directly across from a schoolhouse ! I 
don't know how he found them. But patience 
and knowledge and love, and a wild, primitive 
instinct that making shoes had never taken out 



152 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

of his primitive nature, helped him largely in 
his hunt. He took them, nursed them back to 
strength on a bottle, fed them milk and rice 
until they could forage for themselves, turned 
them loose in the woods, and then, that fall, he 
shot them one after the other as often as he had 
a holiday from the shop, or a moonlight night 
upon which he could hunt. 

But he did not kill all of them. Seven foxes 
were shot at my lower bars last winter. It is now 
strawberry time again, and again an old she-fox 
lies in wait for every hen that flies over the 
chicken-yard fence — which means another litter 
of young foxes somewhere here in the ridges. 
The line continues, even at the hands of the man 
with the gun. For strangely coupled with the 
desire to kill is the instinct to save, in human 
nature and in all nature — to preserve a remnant, 
that no line perish forever from the earth. As the 
unthinkable ages of geology come and go, ani- 
mal and vegetable forms arise, change, and dis- 
appear; but life persists, lines lead on, and in 
some form many of the ancient families breathe 
our air and still find a home on this small and 
smaller-growing globe of ours. 



THE LITTLE FOXES 153 

And it may continue so for ages yet, with our 
help and permission. 

Wild life is changing more rapidly to-day 
than ever before, is being swept faster and faster 
toward the brink of the world ; but it is cheering 
to look out of my window, as I write, and see 
the brown thrasher getting food for her young 
out of the lawn, to hear the scratch of squirrels* 
feet across the porch, to catch a faint and not 
unpleasant odor of skunk through the open win- 
dow as the breeze blows in from the woods, and 
to find, as I found in hoeing my melons early 
this morning, the pointed prints of a fox making 
in a confident and knowing line toward the 
chicken- yard. 

I have lived some forty years upon the earth 
(how the old hickory outside my window mocks 
me !), and I have seen some startling changes in 
wild animal life. Even I can recall a great flock 
of snowy herons, or egrets, that wandered up 
from the South one year and stayed a while on 
the Maurice River marshes, just as, in earlier 
times, it is recorded that along the Delaware 
"the white cranes did whiten the river-bank like a 
great snow-drift." To-day the snowy herons have 



154 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

all but vanished from the remotest glades of the 
South; and my friend Finley, on the trail of the 
Western plume-hunters, searched in vain for a 
single pair of the exquisite birds in the vast tule 
lakes of Oregon, where, only a few weeks before 
his trip, thousands of pairs had nested. He found 
heaps of rotting carcasses stripped of their fatally 
lovely plumes ; he found nests with eggs and 
dead young, but no live birds; the family of 
snowy herons, the whole race, apparently, had 
been suddenly swept off the world, annihilated, 
and was no more. 

A few men with guns — for money — had 
done it. And the wild areas of the world, espe- 
cially of our part of the world, have grown 
so limited now that a few men could easily, 
quickly destroy, blot out from the book of life, 
almost any of our bird and animal families. 
" Thou madest him to have dominion over the 
works of thy hands; thou hast put all things 
under his feet" — literally, and he must go softly 
now lest the very fowl of the air and fish of the 
sea be destroyed forever. Within my memory 
the passenger pigeon, by some cataclysm per- 
haps, has apparently become extinct; and the 



THE LITTLE FOXES 155 

ivory-billed woodpecker probably, this latter by 
the hand of man, for I knew the man who be- 
lieved that he had killed the last pair of these 
noble birds reported from the Florida forests. So 
we thought it had fared also with the snowy 
heron, but recently we have had word from the 
wardens of the Audubon Society that a remnant 
has escaped; a few pairs of the birds have been 
discovered along the Gulf coast — so hardly can 
Nature forgo her own! So far away does the 
mother of life hide her child, and so cunningly ! 

With our immediate and intelligent help, this 
family of birds, from these few pairs can be 
saved and spread again over the savannas of the 
South and the wide tule lakes in the distant 
Northwest. 

The mother-principle, the dominant instinct 
in all life, is not failing in our time. As Nature 
grows less capable (and surely she does!) of 
mothering her own, then man must turn mother, 
as he has in the Audubon Society; as he did in 
the case of the fellow from the shoe-shop who 
saved the little foxes. And there is this to hearten 
him, that, while extinction of the larger forms of 
animal life seems inevitable in the future, a little 



156 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

help and constant help now will save even the 
largest of our animals for a long time to come. 

The way animal life hangs on against almost 
insuperable odds, and the power in man's hands 
to further or destroy it, is quite past belief until 
one has watched carefully the wild creatures of 
a thickly settled region. 

The case of the Indian will apply to all our 
other aborigines. It is somewhat amazing to be 
told, as we are on good authority, that there are 
probably more live Indians on the reservations 
to-day than there were all told over all of North 
America when the white men first came here. 
Certainly they have been persecuted, but they 
have also been given protection — pens ! 

Wild life, too, will thrive, in spite of inevi- 
table persecution and repression, if given only a 
measure of protection. 

Year by year the cities spread, the woods and 
wild places narrow, yet life holds on. The fox 
trots free across my small farm, and helps him- 
self successfully from the poultry of my careful 
raising. 

Nature — man-nature — has been hard on the 
little brute — to save him! His face has grown 



THE LITTLE FOXES 157 

long from much experience, and deep-lined with 
wisdom. He seems a normal part of civilization; 
he literally passes in and out of the city gates, 
roams at large through my town, and dens within 
the limits of my farm. Enduring, determined, re- 
sourceful, quick-witted, soft-footed, he holds out 
against a pack of enemies that keep continually 
at his heels, and runs in his race the race of all 
life, winning for all life, with our help, a long lease 
yet upon the earth. 

For here is Reynard sitting upon a knoll in 
the road, watching me tear down upon him in a 
thirty-horse-power motor-car. He steps into the 
bushes to let me pass, then comes back to the 
road and trots upon his four adequate legs back 
to the farm to see if I left the gate of the henyard 
open. 

There is no sight of Nature more heartening 
to me than this glimpse of the fox; no thought of 
Nature more reassuring than the thought of the 
way Reynard holds his own — of the long-drawn, 
dogged fight that Nature will put up when cor- 
nered and finally driven to bay. The globe is too 
small for her eternally to hold out against man ; 
but with the help of man, and then in spite of 



158 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

man, she will fight so good a fight that not for 
years yet need another animal form perish from 
the earth. 

If I am assuming too much authority, it is be- 
cause, here in the remoteness of my small woods 
where I can see at night the lights of the distant 
city, I have personally taken a heartless hand in 
this determined attempt to exterminate the fox. 
No, I do not raise fancy chickens in order to 
feed him. On the contrary, much as I love to see 
him, I keep a double-barreled gun against his 
coming. He knows it, and comes just the same. 
At least the gun does not keep him away. My 
neighbors have dogs, but they do not keep him 
away. Guns, dogs, traps, poison — nothing can 
keep the foxes away. 

It must have been about four o'clock the other 
morning when one of my children tiptoed into 
my room and whispered, "Father, there 's the old 
fox walking around Pigeon-Henny's coop behind 
the barn." 

I got up and hurried with the little fellow into 
his room, and sure enough, there in the fog of 
the dim morning I could make out the form of a 
fox moving slowly around the small coop. 



THE LITTLE FOXES 159 

The old hen was clucking in terror to her 
chicks, her cries having awakened the small 
boys. 

I got myself down into the basement, seized 
my gun, and, gliding out through the cellar door, 
crept stealthily into the barn. 

The back window was open. The thick, wet 
fog came pouring in like smoke. I moved up 
boldly through the heavy smother and looked 
down into the field. There was the blur of the 
small coop, but where was the fox ? 

Pushing the muzzle of my double-barreled 
gun out across the window-sill, I waited. 

Yes, there, through a rift in the fog, stood the 
fox! What a shot! The old rascal cocked his 
ears toward the house. All was still. Quickly 
under the wire of the coop went his paw, the old 
hen fluttering and crying in fresh terror. 

Carefully, noiselessly, I swung the muzzle of 
the gun around on the window-sill until the bead 
drew dead upon the thief. The cow in her stall 
beside me did not stir. I knew that four small 
boys in the bedroom window had their eyes riv- 
eted upon that fox waiting for me to fire. It was 
a nervous situation, so early in the morning, in 



i6o THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

the cold, white fog, and without anything much 
but sHppers on. Usually, of course, I shot in 
boots. 

But there stood the fox clawing out my young 
chickens, and, steadying the gun as best I could 
on the moving window-sill, I fired. 

That the fox jumped is not to be wondered 
at. I jumped myself as both barrels went off 
together. A gun is a sudden thing any time of 
day, but so early in the morning, and when every- 
thing was wrapped in silence and the ocean fog, 
the double explosion was extremely startling. 

I should have fired only one barrel, for the fox, 
after jumping, turned around and looked all over 
the end of the barn to see if the shooting were 
going to happen again. I wished then that I had 
saved the other barrel. 

All I could do was to shout at him, which 
made him run off. 

The boys wanted to know if I thought I had 
killed the hen. On going out later I found that 
I had not even hit the coop — not so bad a shot, 
after all, taking into account the size of the coop 
and the thick, distorting qualities of the weather. 

There is no particular credit to the fox in this. 



THE LITTLE FOXES i6i 

nor do I come in for any particular credit this 
time; but the little drama does illustrate the 
chances in the game of life, chances that some- 
times, usually indeed, are in favor of the fox. 

He not only got away, but he also got away 
with eleven out of the twelve young chicks in 
that brood. He had dug a hole under the wire 
of the coop, then, by waiting his chance, or by 
frightening the chicks out, had eaten all of them 
but one. 

That he escaped this time was sheer luck ; that 
he got his breakfast before escaping was due to 
his cunning. And I have seen so many instances 
of his cunning that, with my two scientific eyes 
wide open, I could believe him almost as wise as 
he was thought to be in the olden days of fable 
and folk-lore. How cool and collected he can be, 
too! 

One day last autumn I was climbing the steep 
ridge behind the mowing-field when I heard a 
fox-hound yelping over in the hollow beyond. 
Getting cautiously to the top of the ridge, I saw 
the hound off below me on the side of the par- 
allel ridge across the valley. He was beating 
slowly along through the bare sprout-land, and 



i62 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

evidently having a hard time holding the trail. 
Now and then he would throw his head up into 
the air and howl, a long, doleful howl, as if in 
protest, begging the fox to stop its fooling and 
play fair. 

The hound was walking, not running, and at 
a gait almost as deliberate as his howl. Round 
and round in one place he would go, off this way, 
off that, then back, until, catching the scent again, 
or in despair of ever hitting it (I don't know 
which), he would stand stock-still and howl. 

That the hound was tired I felt sure ; but that 
he was on the trail of a fox I could not believe ; 
and I was watching him curiously when some- 
thing stirred on the top of the ridge almost be- 
side me. 

Without turning so much as my head, I saw 
the fox, a beautiful creature, going slowly round 
and round in a circle — in a figure eight, rather 
— among the bushes ; then straight off it went 
and back; off again in another direction and 
back ; then in and out, round and round, utterly 
without hurry, until, taking a long leap down the 
steep hillside, the wily creature was off at an easy 
trot. 



THE LITTLE FOXES 163 

The hound did know what he was about. 
Across the valley, up the ridge, he worked his 
sure way, while I held my breath at his accuracy. 
Striking the woven circle at the top of the ridge, 
he began to weave in and out, back and forth, 
sniffling and whimpering like a tired child, beat- 
ing gradually out into a wider and wider circle, 
and giving the fox all the rest it could want, be- 
fore taking up the lead again and following on 
down the trail. 

The hound knew what he was about; but so 
did the fox : the latter, moreover, taking the in- 
itiative, inventing the trick, leading the run, and 
so in the end not only escaping the hound, but 
also vastly widening the distance between their 
respective wits and abilities. 

I recently witnessed a very interesting instance 
of this superiority of the fox. One of the best 
hunters in my neighborhood, a man widely 
known for the quality of his hounds, sold a 
dog, Gingles, an extraordinarily fine animal, to 
a hunter in a near-by town. The new owner 
brought his dog down here to try him out. 

The hound was sent into the woods and was 
off in a moment on a warm trail. But it was not 



i64 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

long before the baying ceased, and shortly after, 
back came the dog. The new owner was disap- 
pointed ; but the next day he returned and started 
the dog again, only to have the same thing hap- 
pen, the dog returning in a little while with a 
sheepish air of having been fooled. Over and over 
the trial was made, when, finally, the dog was 
taken back to its trainer as worthless. 

Then both men came out with the dog, the 
trainer starting him on the trail and following 
on after him as fast as he could break his way 
through the woods. Suddenly, as in the trials 
before, the baying ceased, but before the baffled 
dog had had time to grow discouraged, the men 
came up to find him beating distractedly about 
in a small, freshly burned area among the bushes, 
his nose full of strong ashes, the trail hopelessly 
lost. With the help of the men the fox was dis- 
lodged, and the dog carried him on in a course 
that was to his new owner's entire satisfaction. 

The fox jumped into the ashes to save himself. 
Just so have the swifts left the hollow trees and 
taken to my chimney, the phoebe to my pigpen, 
the swallow to my barn loft, the vireo to my lilac 
bush, the screech owls to my apple trees, the red 



THE LITTLE FOXES 165 

squirrel for its nest to my ice-house, and the flat- 
nosed adder to the sandy knoll by my beehives, 
I have taken over from its wild inhabitants four- 
teen acres in Hingham ; but, beginning with the 
fox, the largest of my wild creatures, and count- 
ing only what we commonly call "animals" 
(beasts, birds, and reptiles), there are dwelling 
with me, being fruitful and multiplying, here on 
this small plot of cultivated earth this June day, 
some seventy species of wild things — thirty-six 
in feathers, fourteen in furs (not reckoning in the 
muskrat on the other side of the road), twelve in 
scales, four in shells, nine in skins (frogs, newts, 
salamanders) — seventy-five in all. 

Here is a multiple life going serenely and 
abundantly on in an environment whose utter 
change from the primeval is hardly exaggerated 
by phoebe's shift for a nest from a mossy ledge in 
the heart of the ancient woods to a joist close up 
against the hot roof of my pigpen behind the 
barn. From this very joist, however, she has 
already brought off two broods since March, one 
of four and one of five. 

As long as pigpens endure, and that shall be 
as long as the human race endures, why should 



i66 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

not the line of phoebes also endure ? The case of 
the fox is not quite the same, for he needs more 
room than a pigpen ; but as long as the domestic 
hen endures, if we will but give the fox half the 
chance we give to phcebe, he too shall endure. 

I had climbed the footpath from the meadow 
late one autumn evening, and stood leaning back 
upon a short hay-fork, looking into the calm 
moonlight that lay over the frosted field, and lis- 
tening to the hounds baying in the swamp far 
away to the west of me. You have heard at night 
the passing of a train beyond the mountains ; the 
creak of thole-pins round a distant curve in the 
river; the closing of a barn door somewhere down 
the valley. The far-off cry of the hounds was 
another such friendly and human voice calling 
across the vast of the night. 

How clear their cries and bell-like ! How mel- 
low in the distance, ringing on the rim of the 
moonlit sky, round the sides of a swinging silver 
bell ! Their clanging tongues beat all in unison, 
the sound rising and falling through the rolling 
woodland and spreading like a curling wave as 
the pack broke into the open over the level 
meadows. 



THE LITTLE FOXES 167 

I caught myself picking out the individual 
voices as they spoke, for an instant, singly and 
unmistakable, under the wild excitement of the 
drive, then all together, a fiercer, faster chorus as 
the chase swept unhindered across the meadows. 

What was that? A twig that broke, some 
brittle oak leaf that cracked in the path behind 
me ! I held my breath as a soft sound of padded 
feet came up the path, as something stopped, 
breathed, came on — as into the moonlight, be- 
yond the circle of shadow in which I stood, walked 
the fox. 

The dogs were now very near and coming as 
swift as their eager legs could carry them. But I 
was standing still, so still that the fox did not 
recognize me as anything more than a stump. 

No, I was more than a stump ; that much he 
saw immediately. But how much more than a 
stump *? 

The dogs were coming. But what was I ? The 
fox was curious, interested, and after trying to 
make me out from a distance, crept gingerly up 
and sniffed at my shoes ! 

But my shoes had been soaked for an hour in 
the dew of the meadow and seemed to tell him 



i68 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

little. So he backed off, and sat down upon his 
tail in the edge of the pine-tree shadow to watch 
me. He might have outwatched me, though I 
kept amazingly still, but the hounds were crash- 
ing through the underbrush below, and he must 
needs be off. Getting carefully up, he trotted first 
this side of me, then that, for a better view, then 
down the path up which he had just come, and 
into the very throat of the panting clamor, when, 
leaping lightly aside over a pile of brush and 
stones, he vanished as the dogs broke madly 
about me. 

Cool? It was iced! And it was a revelation 
to me of what may be the mind of Nature. I 
have never seen anything in the woods, never 
had a glimpse into the heart of Nature, that has 
given me so much confidence in the possibility 
of a permanent alliance between human life and 
wild life, in the long endurance yet of our vastly 
various animal forms in the midst of spreading 
farms and dooryards, as this deliberate dodge of 
the fox. 

At heart Nature is always just as cool and 
deliberate, capable always of taking every advan- 
tage. She is not yet past the panic, and probably 



THE LITTLE FOXES 169 

never will be; but no one can watch the change 
of age-long habits in the wild animals, their ready 
adaptability, their amazing resourcefulness, with 
any very real fears for what civilization may yet 
have in store for them so long as our superior 
wit is for, instead of against, them. 

I have found myself present, more than once, 
at an emergency when only my helping hand 
could have saved ; but the circumstances have sel- 
dom been due to other than natural causes — 
very rarely man-made. On the contrary, man- 
made conditions out of doors — the multiplicity 
of fences, gardens, fields, crops, trees, for the pri- 
meval uniformity of forest or prairie — are all in 
favor of greater variety and more abundance of 
wild life (except for the larger forms), because all 
of this means more kinds of foods, more sorts of 
places for lairs and nests, more paths and short 
cuts and chances for escape — all things that help 
preserve life. 

One morning, about two weeks ago, I was 
down by the brook along the road, when I heard 
a pack of hounds that had been hunting in the 
woods all night, bearing down in my direction. 

It was a dripping dawn, everything soaked in 



lyo THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

dew, the leaf edges beaded, the grass blades bent 
with wet, so that instead of creeping into the 
bushes to wait for the hunt to drive by, I hurried 
up the road to the steep gravel bank, climbed it 
and sat down, well out of sight, but where I could 
see a long stretch of the road. 

On came the chase. I kept my eyes down the 
road at the spot where the trout brook turns at 
the foot of the slope, for here the fox, if on the 
meadow side of the brook, would be pretty sure 
to cross — and there he stood ! 

I had hardly got my eyes upon the spot, when 
out through a tangle of wild grapevine he wound, 
stopped, glanced up and down, then dug his heels 
into the dirt, and flew up the road below me and 
was gone. 

He was a big fellow, but very tired, his coat 
full of water, his big brush heavy and dragging 
with the dripping dew. He was running a race 
burdened with a weight of fur almost equal to 
the weight of a full suit of water-soaked clothes 
upon a human runner; and he struck the open 
road as if glad to escape from the wallow of wet 
grass and thicket that had clogged his long course. 

On came the dogs, very close upon him ; and 



THE LITTLE FOXES 171 

I turned again to the bend in the brook to see 
them strike the road, when, flash, below me on 
the road, with a rush of feet, a popping of dew- 
laid dust, the fox! — back into the very jaws of 
the hounds I — Instead he broke into the tangle 
of grapevines out of which he had first come, just 
as the pack broke into the road from behind the 
mass of thick, ropy vines. 

Those dogs hit the plain trail in the road with 
a burst of noise and speed that carried them 
through the cut below me in a howling gale, a 
whirlwind of dust, and down the hill and on. 

Not one of the dogs came back. Their speed 
had carried them on beyond the point where the 
fox had turned in his tracks and doubled his trail, 
on so far that though I waited several minutes, 
not one of the dogs had discovered the trick to 
come back on the right lead. 

If I had had a gun ! Yes, but I did not. But 
if I had had a gun, it might have made no partic- 
ular difference. Yet it is the gun that makes the 
difference — all the difference between much or 
little wild life — life that our groves and fields may 
have at our hands now, as once the forests and 
prairies had it directly from the hands of the Lord. 




XIII 
OUR CALENDAR 




HERE are four red-lettered calen- 
dars about the house: one with the 
Sundays in red; one with Sundays 
and the legal holidays in red; one 
with the Thursdays in red, — Thursday being 
publication day for the periodical sending out 
the calendar, — and one, our own calendar, with 
several sorts of days in red — all the high festival 
days here on Mullein Hill, the last to be added 
being the Pup's birthday which falls on Septem- 
ber 15. 

Pup's Christian name is Jersey, — because he 
came to us from that dear land by express when 
he was about the size of two pounds of sugar, — 
an explanation that in no manner accounts for 



OUR CALENDAR 173 

all we went through in naming him. The chris- 
tening hung fire from week to week, everybody 
calling him anything, until New Year's. It had 
to stop here. Returning from the city New Year's 
day I found, posted on the stand of my table- 
lamp, the cognomen done in red, this declara- 
tion: — 

January i, 1915 

No person can call Jersey any other 
name but Jersey. If anybody calls him any other name 
but Jersey, exceeding five times a day he will have to 
clean out his coop two times a day. 

This was as plain as if it had been written on the 
wall. Somebody at last had spoken, and not as 
the scribes, either. 

We shall celebrate Jersey's first birthday Sep- 
tember 15, and already on the calendar the day 
is red — red, with the deep deep red of our six 
hearts! He is just a dog, a little roughish-haired 
mixed Scotch-and-Irish terrier, not big enough 
yet to wrestle with a woodchuck, but able to 
shake our affections as he shakes a rat. And that 
is because I am more than half through with my 
fourscore years and this is my first dog! And 
the boys — this is their first dog, too, every stray 



174 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

and tramp dog that they have brought home, hav- 
ing wandered off again. 

One can hardly imagine what that means ex- 
actly. Of course, we have had other things, chick- 
ens and pigs and calves, rabbits, turtles, bantams, 
the woods and fields, books and kindling — and 
I have had Her and the four boys, — the family 
that is, — till at times, I will say, I have not felt 
the need of anything more. But none of these 
things is a dog, not even the boys. A dog is one 
of man's primal needs. "We want a dog!" had 
been a kind of family cry until Babe's last birthday. 

Some six months before that birthday Babe 
came to me and said : — 

" Father, will you guess what I want for my 
birthday?'* 

" A new pair of skates with a key fore and aft," 
I replied. 

" Skates in August ! " he shouted in derision. 
" Try again.'* 

" A fast-flyer sled with automatic steering-gear 
and an electric self-starter and stopper." 

"No. Now, Father," — and the little face in 
its Dutch-cut frame sobered seriously, — " it 's 
something with four legs." 



OUR CALENDAR 175 

"A duck," I suggested. 

" That has only two^ 

" An armadillo, then." 

"No." 

" A donkey." 

"No." 

"An elephant?" 

"No." 

"An alligator?" 

"No." 

" A h-i-p hip, p-o, po, hippo, p-o-t pot, hippo- 
pot, a hippopota, m-u-s mus — hippopotamus, 
that's what it is!" 

This had always made him laugh, being the 
way, as I had told him, that I learned to spell 
when I went to school; but to-day there was 
something deep and solemn in his heart, and he 
turned away from my lightness with close-sealed 
lips, while his eyes, winking hard, seemed sus- 
piciously open. I was half inclined to call him 
back and guess again. But had not every one 
of the four boys been making me guess at that 
four-legged thing since they could talk about 
birthdays ? And were not the conditions of our 
living as unfit now for four-legged things as 



176 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

ever? Besides, they already had the cow and the 
pig and a hundred two-legged hens. More live 
stock was simply out of the question at present. 

The next day Babe snuggled down beside me 
at the fire. 

" Father," he said, " have you guessed yet ? " 

" Guessed what ? " I asked. 

" What I want for my birthday "? " 

" A nice little chair to sit before the fire in *? " 

" Horrors ! a chair ! why, I said a four-legged 
thing." 

" Well, how many legs has a chair ? " 

"Father," he said, "has a rocking-chair four 
legs?" 

" Certainly." 

"Then it must have four feet, hasn't it?" 

" Cert — why — I — don't — know exactly 
about that," I stammered. " But if you want a 
rocking-chair for your birthday, you shall have 
it, feet or fins, four legs or two, though I must 
confess that I don't exactly know, according to 
legs, just where a rocking-chair does belong." 

" I don't want any chair, nor anything else 
with wooden legs." 

" What kind of legs, then ? " 



OUR CALENDAR 177 

"Bone ones." 

" Why ! why ! I don't know any bone-legged 
things." 

" Bones with hair on them." 

" Oh, you want a Teddybear — you^ and com- 
ing eight ! Well ! Well ! But Teddybears have 
wire legs, I think, instead of bone." 

The set look settled once more on his little, 
square face and the talk ceased. But the fight 
was on. Day after day, week after week, he had 
me guessing — through all the living quadrupeds 
— through all the fossil forms — through many 
that the Lord did not make, but might have 
made, had Adam only known enough Greek and 
Latin to give them names. Gently, persistently, 
he kept me guessing as the far-off day drew near, 
though long since my only question had been — 
What breed? August came finally, and a few 
days before the 24th we started by automobile 
for New Jersey. 

We were speeding along the road for Prince- 
ton when all four boys leaned forward from the 
back seat, and Babe, close in my ear, said : — 

" Shall I have any birthday down here, Father? " 

" Certainly." 



178 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

" Have you guessed what yet % " 

I blew the horn fiercely, opened up the throttle 
till the words were snatched from his teeth by 
the swirling dust behind and conversation was 
made impossible. Two days later, the birthday 
found us at Uncle Joe's. 

Babe was playing with Trouble, the little 
Scotch-Irish terrier, when Uncle Joe and I came 
into the yard. With Trouble in his arms Babe 
looked up and asked : — 

" Uncle Joe, could you guess what four-legged 
thing I want for my birthday ? " 

"You want a dog," said Uncle Joe, and I 
caught up the dear child in my arms and kept 
back his cries with kisses. 

"And you shall have one, too, if you will 
give me three or four weeks to get him for you. 
Trouble here is the daddy of — goodness ! I sup- 
pose he is — of I don't know how many little 
puppies — but a good many — and I am giving 
you one of them right now, for this birthday, 
only, you will wait till their mother weans them, 
of course ? " 

" Yes, yes, of course ! " 

And so it happened that several weeks later a 



OUR CALENDAR 179 

tiny black-and-tan puppy with nothing much of 
a tail came through from New Jersey to Hing- 
ham to hearts that had waited for him very, very 
long. 

Pup's birthday makes the seventh red-letter 
day of that kind on the calendar. These are only 
the beginning of such days, our own peculiar 
days when we keep tryst with ourselves, because 
in one way or another these days celebrate some 
trial or triumph, some deep experience of the 
soul. 

There is Melon Day, for example, — a mov- 
able feast-day in August, if indeed it come so 
early, when we pick the first watermelon. That, 
you ask, a deep emotional experience, an affair of 
the soul? 

This is Massachusetts, dear reader, and I hail 
from the melon fields of Jersey. Even there a 
watermelon, to him who is spiritually minded, 
who, walking through a field of the radiant orbs 
(always buy an elongated ellipsoid for a real 
melon), hears them singing as they shine — even 
to the Jerseyman, I say, the taste of the season's 
first melon is of something out of Eden before 
the fall. But here in Massachusetts, Ah, the 



i8o THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

cold I fight, the drought I fight, the worms I 
fight, the blight I fight, the striped bugs I fight, the 
will-to-die in the very vines themselves I fight, 
until at last (once it was the 7th of August !) the 
heart inside of one of the green rinds is red with 
ripeness, and ready to split at the sight of a knife, 
answering to the thump with a far-off, muffled 
thud, — the family, I say, when that melon is 
brought in crisp and cool from the dewy field, 
is prompt at breakfast, and puts a fervor into the 
doxology that morning deeper far than is usual 
for the mere manna and quail gathered daily at 
the grocer's. 

We have been (once) to the circus, but that 
day is not in red. That is everybody's day, while 
the red-letter days on our calendar — Storm-Door- 
and-Double-Window Day, for instance; or the 
day close to Christmas when we begin, " Marley 
was dead, to begin with"; or the Day of the 
First Snow — these days are peculiarly, privately 
our own, and these are red. 




XIV 
THE FIELDS OF FODDER 




T Is doubtless due to early associa- 
tions, to the large part played by 
^Jn^ cornfields in my boyhood, that I 
g^j^J^ cannot come upon one now in these 
New England farms without a touch of home- 
sickness. It was always the autumn more than the 
spring that appealed to me as a child; and there 
was something connected with the husking and 
the shocking of the corn that took deeper hold 
upon my imagination than any other single event 
of the farm year, a kind of festive joy, some- 
thing solemnly beautiful and significant, that to 
this day makes a field of corn in the shock not so 
much the substance of earth's bounty as the sym- 
bol of earth's life, or rather of life — here on the 



i82 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

earth as one could wish it to be — lived to the 
end, and rich in corn, with its fodder garnered 
and set in order over a broad field. 

Perhaps I have added touches to this picture 
since the days when I was a boy, but so far back 
as when I used to hunt out the deeply fluted corn- 
stalks to turn into fiddles, it was minor notes I 
played — the notes of the wind coming over the 
field of corn-butts and stirring the loose blades as 
it moved among the silent shocks. I have more 
than a memory of mere corn, of heavy-eared stalks 
cut and shocked to shed the winter rain : that, and 
more, as of the sober end of something, the ful- 
fillment of some solemn compact between us — 
between me and the fields and skies. 

Is this too much for a boy to feel *? Not if 
he is father to the man! I have heard my own 
small boys, with grave faces, announce that this 
is the 2 1 St of June, the longest day of the year 
— as if the shadows were already lengthening, 
even across their morning way. 

If my spirit should return to earth as a flower, 
it would come a four-o'clock, or a yellow even- % 

ing primrose, for only the long afternoon shad- 
ows or falling twilight would waken and spread 



THE FIELDS OF FODDER 183 

my petals. No, I would return an aster or a witch- 
hazel bush, opening after the corn is cut, the crops 
gathered, and the yellow leaves begin to come 
sighing to the ground. 

At that word " sighing " many trusting readers 
will lay this essay down. They have had more 
than enough of this brand of pathos from their 
youth up. 

" The * sobbing wind,' the ' weeping rain,* — 
*Tis time to give the lie 
To these old superstitious twain — 
That poets sing and sigh. 

"Taste the sweet drops, — no tang of brine. 
Feel them — they do not burn; 
The daisy-buds, whereon they shine. 
Laugh, and to blossoms turn ** — 

that is, in June they do; but do they in October? 
There are no daisies to laugh in October. A few 
late asters fringe the roadsides; an occasional bee 
hums loudly in among them; but there is no 
sound of laughter, and no shine of raindrops in 
the broken hoary seed-stalks that strew the way. 
If the daisy-buds laughs — as surely they do in 
June, — why should not the wind sob and the 
rain weep — as surely they do — in October *? 
There are days of shadow with the days of sun- 



i84 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

shine ; the seasons have their moods, as we have 
ours, and why should one be accused of more 
sentiment than sense, and of bad rhetoric, too, in 
yielding to the spirit of the empty woods till the 
slow, slanting rain of October weeps, and the 
soughing wind comes sobbing through the trees? 

Fall rain, fall steadily, heavily, drearily. Beat 
off the fading leaves and flatten them into shape- 
less patterns on the soaking floor. Fall and slant 
and flatten, and, if you will, weep. Blow wind, 
through the creaking branches, blow about the 
whispering corners ; parley there outside my win- 
dow ; whirl and drive the brown leaves into hid- 
ing, and if I am sad, sigh with me and sob. 

May one not indulge in gentle melancholy 
these closing days of autumn, and invite the 
weather in, without being taken to task for it? 
One should no more wish to escape from the 
sobering influence of the October days than from 
the joy of the June days, or the thrill in the wide 
wonder of the stars. 

** If winds have wailed and skies wept tears. 
To poet's vision dim, 
'T was that his own sobs filled his ears. 
His weeping blinded him " — 



THE FIELDS OF FODDER 185 

of course ! And blessed is the man who finds 
winds that will wail with him, and skies that love 
him enough to weep in sympathy. It saves his 
friends and next of kin a great deal of perfunc- 
tory weeping. 

There is no month in all the twelve as lovely 
and loved as October. A single, glorious June 
day is close to the full measure of our capacity 
for joy ; but the heart can hold a month of melan- 
choly and still ache for more. So it happens that 
June is only a memory of individual days, while 
October is nothing less than a season, a mood, a 
spirit, a soul, beautiful, pensive, fugitive. So 
much is already gone, so many things seem past, 
that all the gold of gathered crops and glory on 
the wooded hillsides only gild and paint the 
shadow that sleeps within the very sunshine of 
October. 

In June the day itself was the great event. It 
is not so in October. Then its coming and going 
were attended with ceremony and splendor, the 
dawn with invisible choirs, the sunset with all 
the pageantry and pomp of a regal fete. Now the 
day has lessened, and breaks tardily and without a 
dawn, and with a blend of shadow quickly fades 



i86 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

into the night. The warp of dusk runs through 
even its sunlit fabric from daybreak to dark. 

It is this shadow, this wash of haze upon the 
flaming landscape, this screen of mist through 
which the sunlight sifts, that veils the face of the 
fields and softens, almost to sadness, the October 
mood of things. 

For it is the inner mood of things that has 
changed as well as the outward face of things. 
The very heart of the hills feels it. The hush 
that fell with the first frost has hardly been broken. 
The blackened grass, the blasted vine, have not 
grown green again. No new buds are swelling, 
as after a late frost in spring. Instead, the old 
leaves on the limbs rattle and waver down; the 
cornfield is only an area of stubs and long lines 
of yellow shocks; and in the corners of the 
meadow fence stand clumps of flower-stalks, — 
joe-pye-weed, boneset, goldenrod, — bare and al- 
ready bleaching; and deep within their matted 
shade, where the brook bends about an elder 
bush, a single amber pendant of the jewel-weed, 
to which a bumble-bee comes droning on wings 
so loud that a little hyla near us stops his pipe 
to listen! 



THE FIELDS OF FODDER 187 

There are other sounds, now that the shrill cry 
of the hyla is stilled — the cawing of crows beyond 
the wood, the scratching of a beetle in the crisp 
leaves, the cheep of a prying chickadee, the tiny 
chirrup of a cricket in the grass — remnants of 
sounds from the summer, and echoes as of single 
strings left vibrating after the concert is over and 
the empty hall is closed. 

But how sweet is the silence! To be so far 
removed from sounds that one can hear a single 
cricket and the creeping of a beetle in the leaves ! 
Life allows so little margin of silence nowadays. 
One cannot sit down in quiet and listen to the 
small voices; one is obliged to stand up — in a 
telephone booth, a pitiful, two-by-two oasis of 
silence in life's desert of confusion and din. If 
October brought one nothing else but this sweet 
refuge from noises it would be enough. For the 
silence of October, with its peculiar qualities, is 
pure balm. There is none of the oppressive still- 
ness that precedes a severe storm, none of the 
ominous hush that falls before the first frost, none 
of the death-like lack of sound in a bleak snow- 
buried swamp or pasture, none of the awesome 
majesty of quiet in the movement of the mid- 



i88 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

night stars, none of the fearful dumbness of the 
desert, that muteness without bound or break, 
eternal — none of these qualities in the sweet 
silence of October. I have listened to all of these, 
and found them answering to mute tongues 
within my own soul, deep unto deep; but such 
moods are rare — moods that can meet death, 
that can sweep through the heavens with the 
constellations, and that can hold converse with 
the dumb, stirless desert; whereas the need for 
the healing and restoration found in the serene 
silence of October is frequent. 

There are voices here, however, many of them; 
but all subdued, single, pure, as when the chorus 
stops, and some rare singer carries the air on, and 
up, and far away till it is only soul. 

The joyous confusion and happy tumult of 
summer are gone; the mating and singing and 
fighting are over ; the growing and working and 
watch-care done ; the running even of the sap has 
ceased;"the grip of the little twigs has relaxed, and 
the leaves, for very weight of peace, float off into 
the air, and all the wood, with empty hands, 
lies in the after-summer sun, and dreams. 

With empty hands in the same warm sun I lie 



THE FIELDS OF FODDER 189 

and dream. The sounds of summer have died 
away; but the roar of coming winter has not yet 
broken over the barriers of the north. Above my 
head stretches a fanlike branch of witch-hazel, 
its yellow leaves falling, its tiny, twisted flowers 
just curling into bloom. The snow will fall before 
its yellow straps have burned crisp and brown. 
But let it fall. It must melt again; for as long as 
these pale embers glow the icy hands of winter 
shall slip and lose their hold on the outdoor world. 

And so I dream. The woods are at my back, 
the level meadow and wide fields of corn-fodder 
stretch away in front of me to a flaming ridge of 
oak and hickory. The sun is behind me over the 
woods, and the lazy air glances with every gauzy 
wing and flashing insect form that skims the 
sleepy meadow. But there is an unusual play 
of light over the grass, a glinting of threads that 
enmesh the air as if the slow-swinging wind were 
weaving gossamer of blown silk from the steeple- 
bush spindles through the slanting reeds of the 
sun. 

It is not the wind that weaves ; it is a multitude 
of small spiders. Here is one close to my face, 
out at the tip of a slender grass-stem, holding on 



I90 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

with its fore legs and kicking out backward with 
its hind legs a tiny skein of web off into the air. 
The threads stream and sway and lengthen, gather 
and fill and billow, and tug at their anchorage 
till, caught in the dip of some wayward current, 
they lift the little aeronaut from his hangar and 
bear him away through the sky. 

Long before we dreamed of flight, this little 
voyager was coasting the clouds. I can follow 
him far across the meadow in the cobweb basket 
as his filmy balloon floats shimmering over the 
meadow sea. 

Who taught him navigation? By what com- 
pass is he steering? And where will he come to 
port? Perhaps his anchor will catch in a hard- 
hack on the other side of the pasture ; or perhaps 
some wild air-current will sweep him over the 
woodtops, over the Blue Hills, and bear him a 
hundred miles away. No matter. The wind blow- 
eth where it listeth, and there is no port where 
the wind never blows. 

Yet no such ship would dare put to sea except 
in this soft and sunny weather. The autumn seeds 
are sailing too — the pitching parachutes of thistle 
and fall dandelion and wild lettuce, like fleets of 



THE FIELDS OF FODDER 191 

tiny yachts under sail — a breeze from a cut-over 
ridge in the woods blowing almost cottony with 
the soft down of the tall lettuce that has come up 
thick in the clearing. 

As I watch the strowing of the winds, my mel- 
ancholy slips away. One cannot lie here in the 
warm but unquickening sun, and see this sower 
crossing meadow and cornfield without a vision 
of waking life, of fields again all green where 
now stands the fodder, of woods all full of song 
as soon as this sowing and the sleeping of the 
seeds are done. The autumn wind goeth forth 
to sow, and with the most lavish of hands. He 
wings his seeds, and weights his seeds, he burrs 
them, rounds them, and angles them; they fly and 
fall, they sink and swim, they stick and shoot, 
they pass the millstones of the robins' gizzards for 
the sake of a chance to grow. They even lie in 
wait for me, plucking me by the coat-sleeve, fas- 
tening upon my trousers' leg and holding on until 
I have walked with them into my very garden. 
The cows are forced to carry them, the squirrel 
to hide them, the streams to whirl them on their 
foaming drift into places where no bird or squirrel 
or wayward breeze would go. Not a corner within 



192 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

the horizon but will get its needed seed, not a 
nook anywhere, from the wind-swept fodder-field 
to the deepest, darkest swamp, but will come to 
life and flower again with the coming spring. 

The leaves are falling, the birds are leaving, 
most of them having already gone. Soon I shall 
hear the bugle notes of the last guard as the 
Canada geese go over, headed swift and straight 
for the South. And yonder stands the fodder, 
brown and dry, the slanting shocks securely tied 
against the beating rains. How can one be mel- 
ancholy when one knows the meaning of the 
fodder, when one is able to find in it his faith in 
the seasons, and see in it the beauty and the wis- 
dom which has been built into the round of the 
year*? 

To him who lacks this faith and understanding 
let me give a serene October day in the woods. 
Go alone, lie down upon a bank where you can 
get a large view of earth and sky. " One seems 
to get nearer to nature in the early spring days," 
says Mr. Burroughs. I think not, not if by nearer 
you mean closer to the heart and meaning of 
things. " All screens are removed, the earth 
everywhere speaks directly to you; she is not 



THE FIELDS OF FODDER 193 

hidden by verdure and foliage." That is true ; yet 
for most of us her lips are still dumb with the 
silence of winter. One cannot come close to bare, 
cold earth. There is only one flat, faded expres- 
sion on the face of the fields in March ; whereas 
in October there is a settled peace and sweetness 
over all the face of Nature, a fullness and a non- 
withholding in her heart that makes communica- 
tion natural and understanding easy. 

The sap is sinking in the trees, the great tides 
of life have turned, but so slowly do they run 
these soft and fragrant days that they seem almost 
still, as at flood. A blue jay is gathering acorns 
overhead, letting one drop now and then to roll 
out of sight and be planted under the mat of 
leaves. Troops of migrating warblers flit into 
and through the trees, talking quietly among 
themselves as they search for food, moving all the 
while — and to a fixed goal, the far-off South. 
Bob-white whistles from the fodder-field ; the odor 
of ripened fox grapes is brought with a puff of 
wind from across the pasture ; the smell of mint, 
of pennyroyal, and of sweet fern crisping in the 
sun. These are not the odors of death; but the 
fragrance of life's very essence, of life ripened and 



194 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

perfected and fit for storing till another harvest 
comes. And these flitting warblers, what are they 
but another sign of promise, another proof of the 
wisdom which is at the heart of things? And 
all this glory of hickory and oak, of sumac and 
creeper, of burning berries on dogwood and ilex 
and elder — this sunset of the seasons — but the 
preparation for another dawn? 

If one would be folded to the breast of Nature, 
if one would be pressed to her beating heart, if 
one would feel the mother in the soul of things, 
let these October days find him in the hills, or 
where the river makes into some vast salt marsh, 
or underneath some ancient tree with fields of 
corn in shock and browning pasture slopes that 
reach and round themselves along the rim of the 
sky. 

The sun circles warm above me; and up 
against the snowy piles of cloud a broad-winged 
hawk in lesser circles wheels and flings its pierc- 
ing cry far down to me ; a fat, dozy woodchuck 
sticks his head out and eyes me kindly from 
his burrow; and close over me, as if I too had 
grown and blossomed there, bends a rank, purple- 
flowered ironweed. We understand each other ; 



THE FIELDS OF FODDER 195 

we are children of the same mother, nourished 
at the same abundant breast, the weed and I, 
and the woodchuck, and the wheeHng hawk, and 
the piled-up clouds, and the shouldering slopes 
against the sky — I am brother to them all. And 
this is home, this earth and sky — these fruitful 
fields, and wooded hills, and marshes of reed and 
river flowing out to meet the sea. I can ask for 
no fairer home, none larger, none of more abun- 
dant or more golden corn. If aught is wanting, 
if just a tinge of shadow mingles with the rowan- 
scented haze, it is the early-falHng twilight, the 
thought of my days, how short they are, how 
few of them find me with the freedom of these 
October fields, and how soon they must fade into 
November. 

No, the thought of November does not dis- 
turb me. There is one glory of the sun and an- 
other glory of the moon, and another glory of the 
stars ; for one star difFereth from another star in 
glory. So also are the months and seasons. And 
if I watch closely I shall see that not only are the 
birds leaving, but the muskrats are building their 
winter lodges, the frogs are bedding, the buds 
putting on their thick, furry coats — life every- 



196 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

where preparing for the cold. I need to take the 
same precaution, — even in my heart. I will take 
a day out of October, a day when the woods are 
aflame with color, when the winds are so slow 
that the spiders are ballooning, and lying where 
I can see them ascending and the parachute seeds 
go drifting by, I will watch until my eyes are 
opened to see larger and plainer things go by — 
the days with the round of labor until the even- 
ing; the seasons with their joyous waking, their 
eager living; their abundant fruiting, and then 
their sleeping — for they must needs sleep. First 
the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in 
the ear, and after that the field of fodder. If so 
with the corn and the seasons, why not so with 
life ? And what of it all could be fairer or more 
desirable than its October "? — to lie and look 
out over a sunlit meadow to a field of fodder cut 
and shocked against the winter with my own 
hands ! 





XV 
GOING BACK TO TOWN 

ABOR DAY, and school lunches 
begin to-morrow," She said, care- 
fully drying one of the " Home 
Comforts" that had been growing 
dusty on an upper shelf since the middle of June. 
She set the three tin lunch-boxes (two for the 
four boys and one for me) on the back of the 
stove and stood looking a moment at them. 

" Are you getting tired of spreading us bread 
and butter ^ " I asked. 
She made no reply. 

"If you don't put us up our comforts this 
year, how are we going to dispose of all that 
strawberry jam and currant jelly ? " 

" I am not tired of putting up lunches," she 
answered. "I was just wondering if this year we 



198 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

ought not to go back to town. Four miles each 
way for the boys to school, and twenty each way 
for you. Are n't we paying a pretty high price 
for the hens and the pleasures of being snowed 
in?" 

"An enormous price," I affirmed solemnly. 
" And we 've paid it now these dozen winters 
running. Let's go into Boston and take that 
suite of wedge-shaped rooms we looked at last 
fall in Hotel Huntington, at the intersection of 
the Avenue and the railroad tracks. The boys 
can count freight cars until they are exhausted, 
and watch engines from their windows night and 
day." 

" It is n't a light matter," she went on. " And 
we can't settle it by making it a joke. You need 
to be near your work ; I need to be nearer hu- 
man beings; the children need much more rest 
and freedom than these long miles to school and 
these many chores allow them." 

" You 're entirely right, my dear, and this time 
we '11 do it. Our good neighbor here will take the 
cow ; I '11 give the cabbages away, and send for 
* Honest Wash ' Curtis to come for the hens." 

" But look at all this wild-grape jelly ! " she 



GOING BACK TO TOWN 199 

exclaimed, turning to an array of forty-four little 
garnet jars which she had just covered with hot 
paraffin against the coming winter. 

" And the thirteen bushels of potatoes," I broke 
in. "And the apples — there are going to be 
eight or ten barrels of prime Baldwins this year. 
And — " 

But it never comes to an end — it never has 
yet, for as soon as we determine to do it, we feel 
that we can or not, just as we please. Simply de- 
ciding that we will move in yields us such an 
instant and actual city sojourn that we seem 
already to have been and are now gladly getting 
back to the country again. 

So here we have stayed summer and winter, 
knowing that we ought to go back nearer my 
work so that I can do more of it ; and nearer the 
center of social life so we can get more of it — 
life being pretty much lost that is not spent in 
working, or going, or talking! Here we have 
stayed even through the winters, exempt from 
public benefits, blessing ourselves, every time it 
snows on Saturday, that we are here and not there 
for our week ends, here within the " tumultuous 
privacy " of the storm and our own roaring fire- 



200 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

place, with our own apples and popcorn and 
books and selves; and when it snows on Mon- 
day wishing the weather would always temper 
itself and time itself to the peculiar needs of Mul- 
lein Hill — its length of back country road and 
automobile. 

For an automobile is not a snow-plough, how- 
ever much gasoline you give it. Time was when 
I rode a snow-plough and enjoyed it, as my Neigh- 
bor Jonas rides and enjoys his, feeling that he is 
plenty fast enough, as indeed he is, his sense of 
safety on the way, the absolute certainty (so far 
as there can be human certainty) of his arriving 
sometime, being compensation enough for the 
loss of those sensations of speed induced across 
one's diaphragm and over one's epidermis by the 
automobile. 

Speeding is a disease of the hair follicles, I 
think, and the great hallucination of haste under 
which we move and try to have a being is seated 
in the muscles of the diaphragm. Have I not 
found myself rushing for a hundred places by 
automobile that I never should have started for 
at all by hayrick or snow-plough, and thus had 
saved myself that time wholly ^ Space is Time's 



GOING BACK TO TOWN 201 

tail and we can't catch it. The most we can catch, 
with the speediest car, is a sight of its tip going 
around the corner ahead. 

Speed is contagious, and I fear that I have it. 
I moved away here into Hingham to escape it, 
but life in the Hingham hills is not far enough 
away to save a man from all that passes along 
the road. The wind, too, bloweth where it listeth, 
and when there is infection on it, you can't escape 
by hiding in Hingham — not entirely. And once 
the sporulating speed germs get into your sys- 
tem, it is as if Anopheles had bitten you, their 
multiplying and bursting into the blood occur- 
ring regularly, accompanied by a chill at two 
cylinders and followed by a fever for four; a 
chill at four and a fever for six — eight — twelve, 
just like malaria ! 

We all have it, all but Neighbor Jonas. He 
has instead a " stavin' " good mare by the name 
of Bill. Bill is speedy. She sprang, years ago, from 
fast stock, as you would know if you held the 
cultivator behind her. When she comes to har- 
row the garden, Jonas must needs come with 
her to say "Whoa ! " all the way, and otherwise 
admonish and exhort her into remembering that 



202 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

the cultivator is not a trotting-sulky, and that a 
row of beets is not a half-mile track. But the hard 
highways hurt Bill's feet, so that Jonas nowadays 
takes every automobile's dust, and none too 
sweetly either. 

" Jonas," I said, as Bill was cooling off at the 
end of a row, " why don't you get an automo- 
bile?" 

"I take the eggs down to the store every two 
weeks and get a shave; but I don't need a car 
much, havin' Bill," he replied, smashing a vicious 
greenhead on Bill's withers that was keeping her 
mixed up with the traces and the teeth of the 
harrow. "Besides, they 're skittish, nervous things 
compared with a boss. What I 'd like is some- 
thing neither one nor t'other — a sort of cross 
between an auto and Bill." 

"Why not get a Ford car, then," I asked, 
"with a cultivator attachment? It wouldn't 
step on as many hills in the row as Bill does, 
and I think it would beat Bill on the road." 

There was a cluck, a jump, and we were off 
down another row, with Jonas saying: — 

" Not yet. Bill is still fast enough for me." 

And for me, too; yet there is no denying that 



GOING BACK TO TOWN 203 

conditions have changed, that a multitude of 
new ills have been introduced into the social or- 
ganism by the automobile, and except in the 
deep drifts of winter, the Ford car comes nearer 
curing those ills than any other anti-toxin yet 
discovered. 

But here are the drifts still; and here is the old 
question of going back to the city to escape 
them. I shall sometimes wish we had gone back 
as I start out on a snowy, blowy morning; but 
never at night as I turn back — there is that dif- 
ference between going to the city and going 
home. I often think the trip in is worth while 
for the sake of the trip out, such joy is it to pull 
in from the black, soughing woods to the cheer 
of the house, stamping the powdery snow off 
your boots and greatcoat to the sweet din of wel- 
comes that drown the howling of the wind out- 
side. 

Once last winter I had to walk from the sta- 
tion. The snow was deep and falling steadily 
when I left the house in the morning, with in- 
creasing wind and thickening storm all day, so 
that my afternoon train out was delayed and 
dropped me at the station long after dark. 



204 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

The roads were blocked, the snow was knee- 
deep, the driving wind was horizontal, and the 
whirling ice particles like sharp sand, stinging. 
Winding as I bent to the road. 

I went forward leaning, the drag in my feet 
overcome by the pull of the level wind on my 
slant body. Once through the long stretch of 
woods I tried to cut across the fields. Here I lost 
my bearings, stumbled into a ditch, and for a 
moment got utterly confused with the black of 
the night, the bite of the cold, and the smothering 
hand of the wind on my mouth. 

Then I sat down where I was to pull myself 
together. There might be danger in such a situa- 
tion, but I was not really cold — not cool enough. 
I had been forcing the fight foolishly, head-on, 
by a frontal attack instead of on the enemy's flank. 

Here in the meadow I was exposed to the full 
force of the sweeping gale, and here I realized 
for the first time that this was the great storm of 
the winter, one of the supreme passages of the 
year, and one of the glorious physical fights of 
a lifetime. 

On a prairie, or in the treeless barrens and 
tundras of the vast, frozen North, a fight like this 



GOING BACK TO TOWN 205 

could have but one end. What must the wild 
polar night be like ! What the will, the thrill of 
men like Scott and Peary who have fought these 
forces to a standstill at the very poles! Their 
craft, their cunning, their daring, their imagina- 
tion! The sway, the drive, the divine madness 
of such a purpose ! A living atom creeping across 
the ice-cap over the top of the world ! A human 
mote, so smothered in the Arctic dark and storm, 
so wide of the utmost shore of men, by a trail so 
far and filled and faint that only God can follow ! 

It is not what a man does, but what he lives 
through doing it. Life may be safer, easier, longer, 
and fuller of possessions in one place than an- 
other. But possessions do not measure life, nor 
years, nor ease, nor safety. Life in the Hingham 
hills in winter is wretchedly remote at times, 
but nothing happens to me all day long in Bos- 
ton to be compared for a moment with this expe- 
rience here in the night and snow. I never feel 
the largeness of the sky there, nor the wideness 
of the world, nor the loveliness of night, nor the 
fearful majesty of such a winter storm. 

As the far-flung lines swept down upon me 
and bore me back into the drift, I knew some- 



ao6 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

what the fierce delight of berg and floe and that 
primordial dark about the poles, and springing 
from my trench, I flung myself single-handed and 
exultant against the double fronts of night and 
storm, mightier than they, till weak, but victori- 
ous, I dragged myself to the door of a neighbor- 
ing farmhouse, the voice of the storm a mighty 
song within my soul. 

This happened, as I say, once last winter, and 
of course she said we simply ought not to live in 
such a place in winter; and of course, if anything 
exactly like that should occur every winter night, 
I should have to move into the city whether I 
liked city storms or not. One's life is, to be sure, a 
consideration, but fortunately for life all the winter 
days out here are not so magnificently ordered as 
this, except at dawn each morning, and at dusk, 
and at midnight when the skies are set with stars. 

But there is a largeness to the quality of coun- 
try life, a freshness and splendor as constant as 
the horizon and a very part of it. 

Take a day anywhere in the year : that day in 
March — the day of the first frogs, when spring 
and winter meet ; or that day in the fall — the day 
of the first frost, when autumn and winter meet ; 



GOING BACK TO TOWN 207 

or that day in August — the day of the full-blown 
goldenrod, when summer and autumn meet — 
these^ together with the days of June, and more 
especially that particular day in June when you 
can't tell earth from heaven, when everything is 
life and love and song, and the very turtles of 
the pond are moved from their lily-pads to wan- 
der the upland slopes to lay — the day when 
spring and summer meet ! 

Or if these seem rare days, try again anywhere 
in the calendar from the rainy day in February 
when the thaw begins to Indian summer and the 
day of floating thistledown, and the cruising fleets 
of wild lettuce and silky-sailed fireweed on the 
golden air. The big soft clouds are sailing their 
wider sea; the sweet sunshine, the lesser winds, 
the chickadees and kinglets linger with you in 
your sheltered hollow against the hill — you and 
they for yet a little slumber, a little sleep before 
there breaks upon you the wrath of the North. 

But is this sweet, slumberous, half-melancholy 
day any nearer perfect than that day when 

"Announced by all the trumpets of the sky 
Arrives the snow " — 

or the blizzard ? 



208 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

But going back to town, as she intimated, 
concerns the children quite as much as me. They 
travel eight miles a day to get to school, part of 
it on foot and part of it by street car — and were 
absent one day last year when the telephone 
wires were down and we thought there would 
be no school because of the snow. They might 
not have missed that one day had we been in the 
city, and I must think of that when it comes 
time to go back. There is room for them in the 
city to improve in spelling and penmanship too, 
vastly to improve. But they could n't have half so 
much fun there as here, nor half so many things 
to do, simple, healthful, homely, interesting things 
to do, as good for them as books and food and 
sleep — these last things to be had here, too, in 
great abundance. 

What could take the place of the cow and 
hens in the city? The hens are Mansie's (he is 
the oldest) and the cow is mine. But night after 
night last winter I would climb the Hill to see 
the barn lighted, and in the shadowy stall two 
little human figures — one squat on an upturned 
bucket milking, his milk-pail, too large to be held 
between his knees, lodged perilously under the 



GOING BACK TO TOWN 209 

cow upon a half-peck measure ; the other little 
human figure quietly holding the cow's tail. 

No head is turned; not a squeeze is missed — 
this is business here in the stall, — but as the car 
stops behind the scene, Babe calls — 

"Hello, Father!" 

"Hello, Babe!" 

"Three teats done," calls Mansie, his head down, 
butting into the old cow's flank. " You go right 
in, we '11 be there. She has n't kicked but once !" 

Perhaps that is n't a good thing for those two 
little boys to do — watering, feeding, brushing, 
milking the cow on a winter night in order to 
save me — and loving to! Perhaps that is n't a 
good thing for me to see them doing, as I get 
home from the city on a winter night ! 

But I am a sentimentalist and not proof at all 
against two little boys milking, who are liable to 
fall into the pail. 

Meantime the two middlers had shoveled out 
the road down to the mail-box on the street so 
that I ran up on bare earth, the very wheels of 
the car conscious of the love behind the shovels, 
of the speed and energy it took to get the long 
job done before I should arrive. 



2IO THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

"How did she come up?" calls Beebum as he 
opens the house door for me, his cheeks still 
glowing with the cold and exercise. 

"Did we give you wide enough swing at the 
bend ? " cries Bitsie, seizing the bag of bananas. 

"Oh, we sailed up — took that curve like a 
bird — didn't need chains — just like a boule- 
vard right into the barn ! " 

" It 's a fearful night out, is n't it *? " she says, 
taking both of my hands in hers, a touch of awe, 
a note of thankfulness in her voice. 

"Bad night in Boston!" I exclaim. "Trains 
late, cars stalled — streets blocked with snow. 
I 'm mighty glad to be out here a night like 
this." 

"Woof! Woof!" — And Babe and Pup are at 
the kitchen door with the pail of milk, shaking 
themselves free from snow. 

"Where is Mansie?" his mother asks. 

" He just ran down to have a last look at his 
chickens." 

We sit down to dinner, but Mansie does n't 
come. The wind whistles outside, the snow 
sweeps up against the windows, — the night 
grows wilder and fiercer. 



GOING BACK TO TOWN 211 

" Why does n't Mansie come ? " his mother 
asks, looking at me. 

" Oh, he can't shut the hen-house doors, for the 
snow. He '11 be here in a moment." 

The meal goes on. 

"Will you go out and see What is the matter 
with the child?" she asks, the look of anxiety 
changing to one of alarm on her face. 

As I am rising there is a racket in the cellar 
and the child soon comes blinking into the 
lighted dining-room, his hair dusty with snow, 
his cheeks blazing, his eyes afire. He slips into 
his place with just a hint of apology about him 
and reaches for his cup of fresh, warm milk. 

He is twelve years old. 

"What does this mean, Mansie?" she says. 

" Nothing." 

"You are late for dinner. And who knows 
what had happened to you out there in the trees 
a night like this. What were you doing ? " 

"Shutting up the chickens." 

" But you did shut them up early in the after- 
noon." 

"Yes, mother." 

"Well?" 



212 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

" It 's awful cold, mother ! " 

"Yes^" 

" They might freeze ! '* 

"Yes?" 

" Specially those little ones." 

" Yes, I know, but what took you so long *? " 

" I did n't want 'em to freeze." 

"Yes?" 

" So I took a little one and put it on the roost 
in between two big hens — a little one and a big 
one, a little one and a big one, to keep the little 
ones warm ; and it took a lot of time." 

"Will you have another cup of warm milk *? " 
she asks, pouring him more from the pitcher, 
doing very well with her lips and eyes, it seemed 
to me, considering how she ran the cup over. 

Shall I take them back to the city for the win- 
ter — away from their chickens, and cow and dog 
and pig and work-bench and haymow and fire- 
side, and the open air and their wild neighbors 
and the wilder nights that I remember as a child? 

*' There is a pleasure in the pathless woods. 
There is a rapture on the lonely shore. 
There is society where none intrudes. 

By the deep sea — and music in its roar.** 



GOING BACK TO TOWN 213 

Once they have known all of this I can take them 
into town and not spoil the poet in them. 

" Make our boy interested in natural history 
if you can. It is better than games. Keep him in 
the open air. Above all, you must guard him 
against indolence. Make him a strenuous man. 
The great God has called me. Take comfort in 
that I die in peace with the world and myself 
and not afraid" — from the last letter of Captain 
Scott to his wife, as he lay watching the approach 
of death in the Antarctic cold. His own end was 
nigh, but the infant son, in whose life he should 
never take a father's part, what should be his last 
word for him? 

"Make our boy interested in natural history 
if you can. It is better than games. Keep him 
in the open air." 

Those are solemn words, and they carry a mes- 
sage of deep significance. I have watched my 
own boys; I recall my own boyhood; and I be- 
lieve the words are true. So thoroughly do I be- 
lieve in the physical and moral value of the out- 
doors for children, the open fields and woods, 
that before my children were all born I brought 
them here into the country. Here they shall grow 



ai4 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

as the weeds and flowers grow, and in the same 
fields with them; here they shall play as the 
young foxes and woodchucks play, and on the 
same bushy hillsides with them — summer and 
winter. 

Games are natural and good. It is a stick of a 
boy who won't be " it." But there are better things 
than games, more lasting, more developing, more 
educating. Kittens and puppies and children 
play; but children should have, and may have, 
other and better things to do than puppies and 
kittens can do; for they are not going to grow 
up into dogs and cats. 

Once awaken a love for the woods in the heart 
of a child, and something has passed into him that 
the evil days, when they come, shall have to 
reckon with. Let me take my children into the 
country to live, if I can. Or if I cannot, then let 
me take them on holidays, or, if it must be, on 
Sunday mornings with me, for a tramp. 

I bless those Sunday-morning tramps to the 
Tumbling Dam Woods, to Sheppard's Mills, to 
Cubby Hollow, to Cohansey Creek Meadows, 
that I was taken upon as a lad of twelve. We 
would start out early, and deep in the woods, or 



GOING BACK TO TOWN 215 

by some pond or stream, or out upon the wide 
meadows, we would wait, and watch the ways 
of wild things — the little marsh wrens bubbling 
in the calamus and cattails, the young minks at 
play, the big pond turtles on their sunning logs 
— these and more, a multitude more. Here we 
would eat our crackers and the wild berries or 
buds that we could find, and with the sunset 
turn back toward home. 

We saw this and that, single deep impressions, 
that I shall always remember. But better than 
any single sight, any sweet sound or smell, was 
the sense of companionship with my human 
guide, and the sense that I loved 

" not man the less, but nature more. 
From these our interviews,'* 

If we do move into town this winter, it won't 
be because the boys wish to go. 





XVI 

THE CHRISTMAS TREE 

E shall not go back to town before 
Christmas, any way. They have a 
big Christmas tree on the Common, 
but the boys declare they had rather 
have their own Christmas tree, no matter how 
small; rather go into the woods and mark it weeks 
ahead, as we always do, and then go bring it 
home the day before, than to look at the tallest 
spruce that the Mayor could fetch out of the 
forests of Maine and set up on the Common. 
Where do such simple-minded children live, and 
in such primitive conditions that they can carry 
an axe into the woods these days and cut their 



THE CHRISTMAS TREE 217 

own Christmas tree *? Here on the Hills of Hing- 
ham, almost twenty miles from Boston. 

I hope it snows this Christmas as it did last. 
How it snowed ! All day we waited a lull in the 
gale, for our tree was still uncut, still out in the 
Shanty-Field Woods. But all day long it blew, 
and all day long the dry drifts swirled and eddied 
into the deep hollows and piled themselves across 
the ridge road into bluffs and headlands that had 
to be cut and tunneled through. As the afternoon 
wore on, the storm steadied. The wind came 
gloriously through the tall woods, driving the 
mingled snow and shadow till the field and the 
very barn were blotted out. 

" We must go ! " was the cry. " We '11 have 
no Christmas tree ! " 

"But this is impossible. We could never carry 
it home through all this, even if we could find it." 

"But we 've marked it!" 

" You mean you have devoted it, hallowed it, 
you little Aztecs I Do you think the tree will 
mind ? " 

" Why — yes. Would n't you mind, father, 
if you were a tree and marked for Christmas and 
nobody came for you *? " 



ai8 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

" Perhaps I would — yes, I think you 're right. 
It is too bad. But we '11 have to wait." 

We waited and waited, and for once they 
went to bed on Christmas Eve with their tree 
uncut. They had hardly gone, however, when I 
took the axe and the lantern (for safety) and 
started up the ridge for the devoted tree. I found 
it; got it on my shoulder; and long after nine 
o'clock — as snowy and as weary an old Chris 
as ever descended a chimney — came dragging 
in the tree. 

We got to bed late that night — as all parents 
ought on the night before Christmas; but Old 
Chris himself, soundest of sleepers, never slept 
sounder! And what a Christmas Day we had. 
What a tree it was I Who got it? How? No, 
old Chris did n't bring it — not when two of the 
boys came floundering in from a walk that after- 
noon saying they had tracked me from the cellar 
door clear out to the tree-stump — where they 
found my axe ! 

I hope it snows. Christmas ought to have 
snow ; as it ought to have holly and candles and 
stockings and mistletoe and a tree. I wonder if 
England will send us mistletoe this year? Per- 



THE CHRISTMAS TREE 219 

haps we shall have to use our home-grown; but 
then, mistletoe is mistletoe, and one is n't asking 
one's self what kind of mistletoe hangs overhead 
when one chances to get under the chandelier. 
They tell me there are going to be no toys this 
year, none of old Chris's kind but only weird, 
fierce, Fourth-of-July things from Japan. " Christ- 
mas comes but once a year," my elders used to 
say to me — a strange, hard saying; yet not so 
strange and hard as the feeling that somehow, 
this year, Christmas may not come at all. I never 
felt that way before. It will never do ; and I shall 
hang up my stocking. Of course they will have 
a tree at church for the children, as they did last 
year, but will the choir sing this year, "While 
shepherds watched their flock by night" and 
"Hark! the herald angels sing"? 

I have grown suddenly old. The child that 
used to be in me is with the ghost of Christ- 
mas Past, and I am partner now with Scrooge, 
taking old Marley's place. The choir may sing; 
but — 

<* The lonely mountains o'er 
And the resounding shore 
A voice of weeping heard and loud lament !" 



220 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 

I cannot hear the angels, nor see, for the flames 
of burning cities, their shining ranks descend the 
sky. 

"No war, or battle's sound. 
Was heard the world around ; 
The idle spear and shield were high uphung ** 

on that first Christmas Eve. What has happened 
since then — since I was a child ? — since last 
Christmas, when I still believed in Christmas, 
and sang with the choir, " Noel I Noel ! "? 

But I am confusing sentiment and faith. If I 
cannot sing peace on earth, I still believe in it; if I 
cannot hear the angels, I know that the Christ was 
born, and that Christmas is coming. It will not 
be a very merry Christmas; but it shall be a most 
significant, most solemn, most holy Christmas. 

The Yule logs, as the Yule-tide songs, will 
be fewer this year. Many a window, bright with 
candles a year ago, will be darkened. There will 
be no goose at the Cratchits', for both Bob and 
Master Cratchit have gone to the front. But Tiny 
Tim is left, and the Christ Child is left, and my 
child is left, and yours — even your dear dream- 
child " upon the tedious shores of Lethe " that 
always comes back at Christmas. It takes only 



THE CHRISTMAS TREE 221 

one little child to make Christmas — one little 
child, and the angels who companion him, and 
the shepherds who come to see him, and the 
Wise Men who worship him and bring him gifts. 

We can have Christmas, for unto us again, as 
truly as in Bethlehem of Judea, a child is born 
on whose shoulders shall be the government and 
whose name is the Prince of Peace. 

Christ is reborn with every child, and Christ- 
mas is his festival. Come, let us keep it for his 
sake ; for the children's sake ; for the sake of the 
little child that we must become before we can 
enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. It is neither 
kings nor kaisers, but a little child that shall lead 
us finally. And long after the round-lipped can- 
nons have ceased to roar, we shall hear the Christ- 
mas song of the Angels. 

"But see ! the Virgin blest 
Hath laid her Babe to rest — " 

Come, softly, swiftly, dress up the tree, hang 
high the largest stockings ; bring out the toys — 
softly ! 

I hope it snows. 

THE END 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



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